The Phredde Collection

by Jackie French

  ‘Hey, there’s some kangaroos!’ I yelled, glad to have an excuse to interrupt the conversation. Bruce was starting to sound just a bit too keen on Miss Richards.

  ‘They’re pretty weird-looking kangaroos,’ said Phredde dubiously. ‘Their faces look all flat.’

  ‘Maybe someone bashed them on the nose,’ suggested Bruce.

  ‘Huh!’ said Phredde. ‘Who’d bash a whole mob of ’roos on their noses?’

  ‘Well, some people are pretty sick,’ argued Bruce. ‘I mean, they hurt things just for fun.’

  ‘You know, I’m getting just a little concerned,’ interrupted Mrs Olsen worriedly. ‘We’ve been flying for ten minutes now and there’s no sign of the park gate or the buses.’

  ‘Or the kiosk,’ I added.

  ‘Or any koalas,’ put in Phredde. ‘How anyone—any frog can think a tree kangaroo is a koala…’

  ‘Maybe…just maybe…we haven’t got all the way back to the present. I mean the future…’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘I don’t want to worry anyone, but I think that possibly---’

  ‘Hey! There’s a koala!’ I yelled. Then I stopped. ‘Oops, no it isn’t. Koalas don’t have tails.’ ‘Or spots,’ said Phredde.

  ‘Or giant fangs,’ added Bruce slowly, just as the ‘koala’ leapt off its branch onto the back of one of the flat-faced kangaroos.

  The kangaroo gave a high shrill scream. The other ’roos stared, then bounded off through the scattered trees.

  ‘Cowards!’ yelled Phredde. ‘Why don’t you stay and help your friend?’

  The bounding ’roos took no notice.

  ‘We’ve got to save that kangaroo!’ I screamed. ‘Phredde, lower the carpet!’

  ‘No!’ shrieked Mrs Olsen. ‘It’s too dangerous! What would your parents say if I brought you back from a school excursion all ripped up by a…a…’

  ‘A spotted marsupial lion or leopard!’ announced Miss Richards behind me, as the laptop dug into my ribs again. ‘Thylacoleo carnifex. They roamed most of Australia except the arid centre from about one million years ago almost till modern times. It had…or has…powerful jaws to crush its prey…’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said shakily. The leopard’s jaws were round the ’roo’s neck now, as its claws dug into the ’roo’s head and chest.

  ‘And knife-like teeth to rip the flesh apart.’

  ‘Uh, yuk,’ said Phredde.

  I shut my eyes. Mrs Olsen was right. There was nothing we could do. But at least we didn’t have to watch it.

  ‘Hey, cool,’ said Bruce. He considered. ‘It looks more like a leopard to me.’

  ‘Shut up, Bruce,’ I said crossly. Boys! And that goes for frogs too, I thought.

  I opened my eyes squeamishly. The ’roo was on the ground and the lion—or leopard—was having breakfast…lunch…afternoon tea…

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said urgently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Olsen from the front of the carpet. She was looking a bit strange. Maybe she was just hungry, I thought. After all, she hadn’t had any lunch and all that bl…, er, red stuff, must have got her tummy rumbling too.

  Great, I thought. Trapped in the past on a flying carpet with a hungry vampire and my boyfriend—well, okay he’s not a boy and not exactly a boyfriend either but you know what I mean—sucking up to our librarian and my best friend who has lost her PING.

  Mrs Olsen gazed a bit wistfully at the bl…, er, red stuff on the knife-like teeth of the leopard. ‘We should just travel a bit further. Just…just to make sure we’re not in the twenty-first century,’ she said.

  Well, it seemed pretty obvious to me, but Phredde zoomed the carpet off. And we kept looking for signs of civilisation, like take-away pizzas and traffic jams and electric power poles.

  There wasn’t a single pizza joint to be seen. Instead we saw trees, lots and lots of gum trees, all pretty straggly looking, and what Miss Richards said were casuarinas but looked more like shaggy upside-down brooms with such bad dandruff they were going bald. The ground began to rise and the trees got shorter and stockier till they finally disappeared and the brown rocky gullies trickled with sad little seeps of water till finally there was no water at all, just…

  ‘Ice…’ whispered Phredde.

  ‘A glacier,’ corrected Miss Richards.

  Actually, the glacier looked pretty cool.13 It was more blue than white and stretched right up the hill onto a mountain which was all blue-white too. Blobs of white snow broke up the blueness and a cold, dry wind gusted down onto our faces.

  ‘You know,’ said Mrs Olsen slowly, ‘I am almost sure there isn’t a glacier at the Big Koala Wildlife Park. In fact, there hasn’t been one in Australia for over tens of thousands of years…’

  ‘We haven’t seen any signs of smoke either,’ added Miss Olsen.

  ‘No barbecues?’ I said.

  ‘No Aboriginal inhabitants,’ corrected Miss Richards. ‘So we are probably over 100,000 years in the past, before humans came here.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. The glacier was really spectacular (and noisy too—it sort of cracked and groaned). But I was in no mood to appreciate the glories and wonders of nature. (Yuk. Amelia used that phrase in her last science essay. Doesn’t it make you sick?)

  And a glacier was no place to spend the day—or the night. As Miss Richards said, we had to find a suitable campsite and rig up some sort of shelter before it got dark and even colder—seeing we could be here for a while.

  So Phredde turned the carpet around and we zoomed despondently back to the lowlands. The trickle of icy water from the glacier became a creek again, then the creek became a river—a pretty shallow river, twisting and winding its way through the hills. Then the river grew straighter and the ground got flatter, and as we landed on the grassy riverbank I tried to be thankful that at least it was grass, not moss or ferns or mud, but it didn’t help much.

  I was cold and hungry and I wanted my mum and my dad and my own little bed in my own little castle—well, actually it’s a great big bed made out of rose petals and our castle is pretty enormous but it sounds better if you say they’re little. It made me sound more sad and lonely somehow, which I was, even if I had my two best friends with me plus our teacher and a librarian and her laptop.

  ‘Well, everyone,’ Mrs Olsen was trying to sound brisk and cheerful, ‘the first thing we need to do is build a shelter for tonight, just in case it rains.’

  ‘Out of what?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘Out of…er, palm fronds,’ suggested Mrs Olsen.

  Bruce shook his froggy head. ‘There aren’t any palms. Just gum trees. I don’t think gum-tree branches will keep the rain out. And we don’t have an axe or anything to cut them down with.’

  ‘How about we find a cave again?’ I suggested.

  Miss Richards shook her head. She had her laptop open again. ‘It might take us days to find a cave. We were lucky last time. Besides, this isn’t limestone country now and that’s where you find caves. No, I think what we need to do is build a wattle-and-daub hut.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  Miss Richards suddenly got a bright gleam in her eyes. ‘See those dark-trunked trees? They’re wattles, or acacias. But even young gum trees will do,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘You just snap off the young trees, so we won’t need an axe, and we can strip bark off the larger trees for the roof.’

  ‘Wow, Miss Richards. You are cool,’ said Bruce. ‘Huh,’ I said, and began to look for baby gum trees.

  Well, I hate to say it, but it worked. Sort of, anyway. Just in case you’re ever trapped in the bush without an axe or a fully operational flying carpet to get you back to civilisation—or a speeding phaery has landed you well in the past—all you need to do is break off a few hundred baby trees.

  First of all, you choose a flattish spot well up the hill from the river, in case it decides to flood during the night and take you with it.

  Then you choose five big trees that are sort of growing in the right place for four corners with one e
xtra tree near one of the corners because that holds the door. Then you pile the baby trees one on top of another to make the four walls, splodging them thickly with wet clay from the riverbank mixed with dead grass and stuff (which makes a real mess) so they don’t fall over and to fill up the cracks. And make sure you leave the door bit open or you’ll have to use your flying carpet to get in and out through the roof.

  Which brings me to the roof bit: because mud washes away in the rain, the roof needs to go right out over the walls to protect them. When your walls are higher than you are—which is pretty short if you’re a phaery but pretty high if you’re a librarian—you put lots more baby trees across the four walls for some beams, then lay strips of bark across them.

  Don’t try to get the bark off the trees with your fingernails or you won’t have any fingernails. Just hope you have a librarian around who’ll find a few sharp stones or jagged bones to use like knives, but once you slice into the bark it peels off the tree really easily. (Except it has to be the right sort of thick bark, and don’t take more than one strip from any one tree because you’ll kill the tree.)

  And finally you’ve got a hut that will keep out the wind and the rain and spotty leopards—you hope, anyway.

  We were all pretty proud when we’d finished. Even if it wasn’t a castle it was still a pretty good effort for a kid, a phaery, a frog, a teacher and a know-all librarian.

  We were also muddy, hungry and very, very tired.

  Phredde glanced up at the sun, which was still plodding across the sky. ‘This day has gone on forever,’ she said.

  Miss Richards nodded. ‘I think we must have arrived in this time early in the morning,’ she said. ‘It’s taken us at least six hours to build the hut.’

  Six hours! My tummy rumbled in sympathy.

  ‘I need food!’ I said.

  Miss Richards nodded. She’d been consulting her laptop all day and had more or less taken over as leader. ‘There’s food all around us!’ she said.

  ‘There is?’ I peered round: nope, no pizzas swinging from the trees, no hamburgers growing on the bushes. Not even a cheese and tomato sandwich with beetroot and pickled cucumbers on one of the rocks.

  ‘See?’ said Miss Richards. ‘That green stuff by the edge of the river is watercress. Of course, it’s a bit muddy at the moment but you can swim out to the middle of the river and wash it clean. There’s plenty there for all of us.’

  ‘Oh yummy,’ I muttered.

  ‘And those are kurrajong fruits. My notes say they’re a bit tasteless but they’re full of vitamins. If we dig up the roots, too, we can roast them on the fire like potatoes. Of course they’ll be a bit tough…’

  Roots…green stuff…

  ‘I’d rather have a sausage and pineapple pizza with olives and sundried tomatoes,’ I said.

  ‘I think I’ll stick to mosquitoes,’ said Bruce. ‘There’s sure to be some when it starts to get dark.’

  ‘I never touch green stuff,’ said Mrs Olsen.

  Phredde just said, ‘Errk.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Richards. She thought for a moment. ‘Well, we could fly back to the spot where we saw the leopard. It may have left enough of the kangaroo—they’re called procoptodons, if anyone is interested (I wasn’t), and see if there’s enough meat left for a barbecue.’

  Well, leftover leopard-chewed procoptodon wasn’t sausage and pineapple pizza, or even a chicken kebab with tabouli and sliced onions and lots of garlic sauce. But it was better than weeds and dry-looking berries.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Barbecue it is.’

  Mrs Olsen sort of sighed. She had this really hungry look. Normally you can hardly see her fangs at all, but now they were sticking out more than ever.

  Phredde and I flew off on the carpet to get the meat, while the others built up a big fire by our hut and Miss Richards started weaving a basket out of stringybark to collect berries in. She’d seen some wild raspberry bushes while we were coming back from the glacier, she said, but we really did need a basket to carry them in.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Bruce helpfully. I noticed he didn’t offer to help us bring back the meat.

  The leopard had eaten most of one haunch of the flat-faced ’roo (the haunch is all that meat just up from the leg) but there was still plenty left for us. We looked round carefully in case the leopard was guarding its leftovers, but it must have slunk off somewhere for a drink or something, because there were no savage-looking animals around.

  Phredde kept the carpet hovering a few centimetres off the ground while I hauled the carcass aboard. The carpet was looking a bit the worse for wear by now. It looked even grottier with a big slab of dead kangaroo on it.

  The fire was burning brightly when we got back, which was a good thing as it was finally starting to get dark. About a zillion stars were bursting out all over the sky, a million times brighter than in our time—I suppose because there wasn’t any smog to tarnish them.

  ‘And no bright lights either,’ said Miss Richards. She’d stuck four sticks in the ground and had built a sort of table from fallen dead branches all tied together with vine on top of them, and she’d got Bruce to haul over great armloads of bracken and pile them up in the hut for our beds too, so we didn’t have to sleep on the bare ground.

  Now she was busy with a big round rock, grinding up kurrajong tree roots into a sort of paste. ‘Bright lights really drain all the colour from the stars,’ she added.

  ‘You know just about everything,’ said Bruce, a bit undeservedly, I thought. After all, she did have her laptop…

  It took a while to separate the kangaroo meat from the bones and skin. A messy while. What with bits of kangaroo gunge sticking to my arms and fingers, not to mention a blob on my nose, and mud and sweat and a few smudges of dinosaur doo, I was pretty stinky.

  ‘I need a swim before dinner,’ I said.

  Phredde sniffed under her arms. ‘Me too,’ she said.

  I waited for Bruce to say ‘Me too’ too—Bruce is always ready for a swim. But he’d hopped off to dig up a few more roots for Miss Richards.

  So Phredde and I took the flying carpet and went swimming by ourselves.

  * * *

  13 I didn’t mean that to be a pun, but it’s pretty good isn’t it? Cool—glacier. Get it?

  Chapter 16

  A Swim Before Dinner

  You know something? It’s a bit spooky jumping into a strange, dark river 100,000 years in the past.

  Phredde and I stood on the riverbank and stared at the water.

  ‘You go first,’ I suggested.

  ‘No, you,’ said Phredde.

  ‘I said it first,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re bigger than me. You’ll make a great big splash and scare away…well, anything that needs scaring.’

  I gulped. ‘Miss Richards said it was perfectly safe. She said there haven’t been any big tentacly things or crocodile-type things for ages. She said we just had to be careful not to dive in case we hit our heads on a rock, and to keep together in case one of us gets a cramp and…’

  Actually, I think Miss Richards had been more interested in grinding up kurrajong roots than in what Phredde and I were doing, and Bruce had been more interested in helping her, and Mrs Olsen had been more interested in staring at the bl…, er, red stuff, oozing out of the meat…

  In the end we jumped in together.

  ‘It’s cold!’ yelled Phredde, and then she blinked. ‘No it’s not,’ she added. ‘I thought it would be cold as ice because of the glacier, but it’s nice and warm.’

  I trod water beside her. ‘It’s funny,’ I said, ‘it’s cold in some spots and warmer in others. It smells a bit funny too. Not really bad—just funny.’

  I flung myself back and began to backstroke. The last of the light was fading from the sky, and I could see a bright star beaming away on the horizon—like it didn’t know there was only us to see it. I suppose my eyes had gradually got used to the darkness, because I could see the trees up
on the hills too, and a big roundish mountain behind them.

  It was pretty nice actually. Warm, soft water getting me all clean, and just me and Phredde and no-one else—except for Mrs Olsen and Bruce and Miss Richards—for thousands of kilometres and a 100,000-odd years.

  Maybe humans hadn’t even been invented yet, or evolved, or whatever it was, and we were the only people in the universe, unless there were some aliens crashing their spaceships a few lightyears away. Which meant if we had to stay here forever then Bruce was the only bloke in the world—or he would be when he stopped being a frog. Which meant that he and I…

  I suddenly wondered exactly how old Miss Richards was. If she’d left school at eighteen, then three years at uni and one year working…

  I thrust the thought away.

  ‘You know,’ I said, turning over and splashing my version of breaststroke through the water (which means you keep your head out the whole time and don’t get your ears wet and you can talk to your friends), ‘it’s nice to be able to swim without worrying about a prehistoric monster nibbling your nose.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Phredde. She was doing phaery backstroke (which means leaning back and letting your wings work like fluttery propellers). ‘Hey, there’s a rock here. I can stand up in the middle of…oooop!’

  The rock slowly rose in the water, tumbling Phredde off. You’ve never seen a phaery backstroke so fast. I switched from breaststroke to overarm to get me out of there then. Six strokes and 2.5 seconds later (it was a pity there was no Olympic selector timing us) we were up on the riverbank. ‘What was that?’ breathed Phredde.

  The rock grew bigger and bigger, and then it grew a head as well, with two beady eyes and two big horns.

  ‘That’s not a rock,’ I said. ‘That’s a turtle.’

  ‘But it’s BIG,’ said Phredde, gazing at it.

  The turtle stared at us with its tiny black eyes then submerged again.

  ‘Um, what do turtles eat?’ asked Phredde casually.