Wild Stories

by Colin Thompson

  Below the shed the other hedgehogs began to stir. Barry’s mother rolled over and stretched. She reached out with her eyes still closed to where Barry should have been but the grass was cold and damp. At first she thought he might have got up early, but when she looked she could see that his bed hadn’t been slept in at all.

  She woke the others and they hurried out into the spring sunshine. Over a winter of hibernating they had grown thin and the sunlight blinded them after their long sleep of darkness.

  ‘He’s dead,’ cried Barry’s mother, ‘I know he is. My poor little mite is frozen stiff and all alone.’

  She snuffled around in the grass and bushes but there was no sign of him. She found his kettle but it was cold and empty.

  ‘I blame myself,’ said Barry’s mother. ‘I should never have left him.’

  She raced round and round in circles looking for her son. There was no stopping her. The others tried to tell her she was wasting her time but she didn’t hear them.

  She ran in larger and larger circles until she was right out of the orchard and down near the bottom of the garden. She darted under bushes, looked deep into the pond, jumped over a rotten log and came crashing down on a big fat prickly mattress.

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Barry, is it really you?’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ said his mother, hugging him the way only one hedgehog can hug another.

  They went back to the shed and while all the others sat in a big circle he told them his story. It took two days to tell it because every time he started describing the wonderful slugs he had eaten everyone had to rush outside and find some food.

  ‘Now then, young hedgehogs, just let that be a lesson to you all,’ said a wise old grandfather.

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’ said Barry’s little brother.

  ‘Well, er, you tell them, Barry.’

  ‘The moral of the story is that if you don’t listen to your mother you could end up with lots of new friends and tons and tons of amazing slugs to eat.’

  ‘BARRY!’

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  The Boy Next Door

  Elsie the Mole had never felt so miserable in her life. She had a terrible headache and an awful cold and to make it worse she was in love with the boy next door who didn’t even notice her.

  She had caught the cold because she kept tunnelling up to next door’s lawn in the middle of winter. Down in the tunnels where she lived with her mother it was damp and warm, but up above there was a thick frost on the grass and dark grey clouds full of snow.

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ said her mother. ‘Chasing round after that boy like that.’

  ‘He doesn’t even know I exist,’ complained Elsie, sniffing loudly.

  ‘Well, no nice mole would want someone who rushes around like you do,’ said her mother.

  Elsie’s heart-throb was different from all the other moles. He didn’t live in dark tunnels like the rest of them. He was a brave and fearless adventurer who spent most of his life tightrope walking across the garden. He had a brother who was just the same and together they performed an amazing double act high above next door’s lawn. Sometimes one of them came down on to the lawn but Elsie was too nervous to speak and just peered out from the flower beds with her little heart full of love.

  The reason Elsie had a headache was because of her cold. Moles who spend most of their lives in dark tunnels don’t need to see and so they are nearly blind. They find their way round with their noses but because Elsie had a cold she couldn’t smell anything. Usually she could pick up a worm’s sweat twenty metres away, but now she couldn’t even smell her own armpits and kept crashing into everything. Every time the tunnel went left or right, Elsie didn’t. She went flying straight on into the wall and that was why she had a headache.

  ‘Nobody loves me,’ she wailed. ‘I wish I were dead.’

  ‘Why don’t you just curl up in the nest and I’ll bring you a nice hot slug?’ suggested her mother, but Elsie just couldn’t sit still. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the boy next door and had to go rushing off down the tunnels to find him.

  Her eyes were streaming and her head was throbbing and even though she could hardly see past the end of her nose, she could tell that her hero was not there. She was heartbroken and waddled back to her nest to cry herself to sleep. He wasn’t there the next day or the next. In fact, it was over a week before Elsie saw him again. By then she had decided that she would never love anyone again and would spend the rest of her life stamping on earwigs and kicking worms.

  After a week her cold was getting better and she decided to go next door one last time. The winter sun shone softly through the cold air and there across the lawn, dark and mysterious, was her great love. He was lying asleep in the grass all black and dull like rich velvet.

  It’s now or never, thought Elsie and tiptoed shyly out from the lavender bushes. She ran across the lawn towards her sweetheart who lay in a dark blur beneath the clothes line. As she drew close, she tripped over a clothes peg and landed right on top of him.

  ‘Oh, my darling!’ she cried, flinging her stubby little paws around the dark frostbitten shape.

  ‘Oi,’ said Neville the rat, who had been hiding behind a concrete gnome, ‘that’s my sock. I saw it first.’

  Ethel the Chicken

  Behind the house, at the bottom of the overgrown garden, in a wooden box hidden under a bramble bush, lived a chicken called Ethel. On the side of the box was a label that said ‘1ST CLASS ORANGES’. Even though chickens are nearly as stupid as sheep, Ethel knew that she was not an orange.

  ‘I am a chicken,’ she said.

  ‘Prove it,’ said a young rat called Neville, who lived in a paper bag nest under the old house. He was only a child and had never seen an orange or a chicken before.

  ‘Wow, a talking chicken!’ shouted an ant, but no one could hear her because she was very very small and before she could rush off and tell her four hundred and eighty brothers and sisters Ethel ate her.

  ‘Listen, rat,’ said Ethel, ‘oranges are round and don’t have feathers and don’t lay eggs.’

  ‘They might,’ said Neville.

  ‘You’re a stupid little rat,’ said Ethel, ‘nearly as stupid as a sheep.’ And she laid an egg.

  ‘Is that an orange?’ asked Neville.

  ‘Of course not, it’s an egg,’ snapped Ethel.

  ‘But it’s round and got no feathers,’ said Neville. Before Ethel could say anything else, Neville’s mother came rushing down the lawn and grabbed him by the ear.

  ‘How many times have I told you not to talk to strange fruit?’ she said as she dragged him off.

  Ethel settled back down on her nest and looked through the tall grass at the old house. It was a very long time since anyone had come out into the garden.

  It’s probably an hour, she thought to herself. The old lady who had lived in the house had gone away ages ago but chickens can’t tell the time. She knew she hadn’t been given any corn that morning but she’d had an enormous worm and a couple of lovely slugs for breakfast so she wasn’t hungry.

  When the old lady’s nephew had come and taken all the furniture away they hadn’t seen Ethel. They had come out into the back garden and folded up the deckchairs but Ethel had heard them talking about chicken and chips and had sat very still under the rhubarb until they’d gone. They’d closed the curtains, locked the doors and driven off in a red car.

  Ethel felt that there was more to life than eating worms and slugs and laying eggs, but she didn’t know what it was. She tried to think about it but chickens’ brains aren’t very good at thinking and every time she tried she fell asleep. As she sat there dozing away in the afternoon sunshine, young Neville came back.

 
; ‘My mum says I’ve got to come and say sorry for being cheeky to you,’ he said. Ethel said it was all right and that she was sure he was quite a good boy really.

  ‘Can I be your friend?’ asked Neville.

  ‘Of course you can,’ said the old hen, and they chatted about this and that for a while. Neville said his mum had been in a bad mood ever since the old lady had gone.

  ‘We used to eat cake and toffees,’ he explained, ‘but now the house is empty we have to eat woodlice all the time.’

  ‘I like woodlice,’ said Ethel. But then, she had never eaten cake.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Neville. ‘All the bits stick in your teeth.’

  ‘I haven’t got teeth,’ Ethel told him. ‘I like the way their legs tickle as you swallow them.’

  Neville looked a bit green at this and said he had to go and help his dad chew up some paper bags. Ethel told him to come and see her any time he felt like it. When he had gone she realised what the other thing was that she had been trying to think of. It was loneliness.

  Since the old lady had gone, no one had come to see her. Every morning the old lady had come down the garden with a mug of corn and every morning she had tickled the top of Ethel’s head and talked to her. Most of the time Ethel hadn’t been able to understand what the old lady had been talking about but the words had always felt warm and comforting in her ears. Ethel was old herself and hardly ever laid an egg but the old lady had never seemed to mind.

  It was only now that the young rat had started to visit her that she realised how much she missed the old lady and how lonely she was. The hedgehogs who came and took the occasional egg she rolled out of her box were a miserable lot. You couldn’t talk to them at all. When Ethel tried they just grunted a bit and shuffled off into the undergrowth. The other birds laughed at her because she was big and lumpy and couldn’t fly and next door’s cat just sneered at her. But then next door’s cat sneered at everybody.

  The next day young Neville came to see Ethel again. He told her about all sorts of wonderful things she had never heard of like skateboards and calculators. But when Ethel tried to talk about slugs, Neville grew restless and sat there fidgeting and sucking bits of woodlouse out of his teeth. Eventually he wandered off saying he had to help his dad again.

  It was a lovely hot summer afternoon. Ethel sank into her nest, half asleep, and clucked softly to herself. Bright butterflies skipped in and out of the dandelion flowers whistling the latest tune. Ethel had never eaten a butterfly and wondered what they tasted like. She didn’t know that they were just caterpillars with their best clothes on.

  She could hear children playing in the garden next door. She liked children. The old lady had brought some to see her once and they’d all tickled her feathers and cuddled her. It had made her feel very happy.

  She thought about going next door to see the children but there was a big hedge and a tall fence all round the garden, far too tall for a fat old chicken to get over. At her age, it was all she could do to jump up on to the roof of her box. A diet of juicy worms and slugs had made her so fat that sometimes as she waddled around the lawn, she tripped over her own feet. It was no fun being old and even worse being lonely and old.

  ‘You ought to try and get out a bit more,’ said Neville’s mum, when Ethel said she felt lonely. ‘There’s all sorts of things going on round the garden.’

  ‘I’m too old for all that,’ said Ethel. ‘All I want is my old lady to come back.’

  ‘You should go and meet the rabbits down by the apple trees,’ Neville’s mum went on, but there was no cheering Ethel up.

  ‘I just want it to be like it used to be,’ she said sadly.

  The summer drifted lazily on. Neville came to see Ethel less and less. He wanted to play with his friends, to chase squirrels and tease next door’s cat, not listen to an old chicken talk about slugs. Neville’s mother didn’t come any more either, not now she had seven new children to look after. Ethel couldn’t blame them, she knew she was boring. Sometimes just the simple effort of looking for worms seemed too much. In the good old days there had always been a magic in scratching away at the earth and jumping back, head to one side, to find some new treasure. Now everything seemed to have lost its taste. Grass, worms, daffodils or slugs, it was all the same. Only woodlice had any sweetness left and they seemed to run faster than they used to and be harder to catch.

  The first leaves began to fall and a breath of cold crept into the garden. The children next door stopped playing outside and the air was filled with the thick smoke of autumn as everybody piled up the dying plants into smouldering bonfires. In Ethel’s garden the dead flowers shrivelled up with no one to clear them away. They hung over like thin skeletons and in the mornings were stiff with frost. The golden leaves turned brown and collected in damp piles on the lawn. The days grew dark and short as winter covered the world. Ethel hid deep in her straw and tried to sleep. The slugs had finished and the worms had gone deeper into the earth. A few spiders still survived the cold and it was those that kept her going.

  Rain came and broke up the old flowers and washed them into the ground. It washed the label off Ethel’s box and dripped in through the cracks in the wood. It ran down her face so that if you had seen her you would have said you’d seen a chicken cry. The dampness crept into her bones and made them creak and her loneliness seemed to grow as dark as the winter nights.

  She cheered up a bit when the snow came. It made the garden bright and clean. It covered her box with a thick coat that kept her warm and dry and it lasted for weeks. Neville began to visit her again and although Ethel knew he was only coming to get away from his baby brothers and sisters, she was glad to see him. He made a tunnel under the snow right across the lawn and sat shivering in front of Ethel’s box telling her all his news.

  ‘My dad’s been eaten by next door’s cat,’ he said, through chattering teeth, ‘and my brother Trevor.’

  Ethel couldn’t think of anything to say so she tucked the young rat up in the straw next to her and clucked. It started to snow again, great big flakes that seemed to float around for ages before they landed.

  ‘Why’s it so cold?’ said Neville, who had never seen a winter before.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ethel. ‘It always seems to be cold when it snows.’

  ‘Is it going to be like this forever?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no, it always goes away again,’ said Ethel.

  ‘What, back up in the sky?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, where does it go?’ asked Neville.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  Neville’s little sister, Tracy, popped up out of the tunnel and jumped up and down in front of them blowing out white puffs of cold breath.

  ‘Mum says you’ve got to come home,’ she squeaked. ‘We’ve run out of paper bags.’

  Neville climbed out of the warm and followed his little sister back down the tunnel. Ethel closed her eyes and dreamt of the old lady surrounded by sunshine and fresh grass.

  The snow melted, more rain came and went and then one day the air seemed to be a little warmer. The sun grew bigger and stayed in the sky longer each day and opened new buds on the sleeping trees. Ethel got up and scratched about on the lawn. She found herself wandering further and further from her box into corners of the garden she had long forgotten. The rheumatism in her bones seemed to fade until she could no longer hear her joints creaking. She fluttered right up into an old apple tree and sat there feeling quite pleased with herself.

  As she sat there fluffing her feathers out, one of the curtains at the back of the house opened and a man looked out. She kept very still. One by one all the curtains were opened, windows and doors too. Ethel kept so still that her legs went to sleep and she fell out of the tree. She lay in the grass but no one came. No one had seen her and after a while the man shut the doors and windows and went
away.

  Later on Neville slipped out of the shadows and jumped into Ethel’s box.

  ‘I’m not happy,’ he said, sounding quite grown up. ‘Humans and rats are not friends.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Ethel. ‘The old lady was wonderful.’

  ‘She was old,’ said Neville. ‘She didn’t know we were there. Most people don’t like us and try and kill us.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ asked Ethel.

  ‘My mum says it’s because we chew their slippers,’ said Neville.

  Ethel didn’t know what slippers were and when Neville told her she got that horrid taste in her mouth you get when someone sucks a handkerchief. She said she was sure he was wrong and anyway perhaps the old lady was coming back. But she didn’t. Over the next few weeks the man brought lots of people to the house but none of them was the old lady. Ethel sat quietly in her box and no one saw her. She knew in her heart that the young rat was probably right and she grew nervous at all the coming and going.

  A few days later Neville and his mother came to say goodbye.

  ‘We’re going to live in this wonderful drain with my cousin Kevin,’ said Neville, all excited. ‘It goes right under the best restaurant in town. The rubbish is really great.’

  Ethel felt very sad when they had gone. She even ignored a giant slug that slithered right in front of her box.

  One day some people came to the house and stayed. They took down all the old grey curtains and put up new ones covered in big red flowers. At night the windows were filled with yellow light that poured out on to the lawn. New smells drifted down the garden, wonderful warm smells that Ethel had never experienced before. There was still no sign of the old lady. A man came out on Saturday and cut the grass. He passed right by Ethel hiding in the back of her box, but he never saw her.

  Then as if by magic there were children in the garden. A boy and a girl running and laughing, climbing the trees and swinging from the branches. Round and round they ran throwing a big blue ball in the air. A big blue ball which bounced and rolled and rolled and rolled right up to Ethel’s box.