‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they eat humans.’
‘What about phaeries?’
‘Don’t know that either.’
‘We’ll have to ask Miss Richards,’ said Phredde. ‘Huh,’ I said.
We considered giving the flying carpet a rinse, but that would have meant it would be too wet to fly and we’d have to trudge back to the hut, so we didn’t.
The sun was sitting on the horizon like a great big glowing orange (I must remember to use that in my next essay) as we flew through the gum trees. I bet my nose would have found our way back even if we’d forgotten how to get there. That roast ’roo smelt good.
Phredde landed the carpet and we trudged—okay, I trudged and Phredde flew—over to the fire. By now Miss Richards had arranged chair-like rocks for all of us. They even had soft little bark mats on them so our sit-upons didn’t get too cold and numb on the hard stone.
The ’roo was roasting on a spit over the fire and little drops of fat were sizzling as they met the flames. My tummy suddenly remembered how hungry it was. Okay, it wasn’t nice tame sausages or chops from the butchers, but right now I didn’t care.
Miss Richards handed me a hard little cake. I sniffed it. It smelt…well, given I hadn’t eaten for 144 million years, it smelt pretty good.
I took a cautious nibble. The cake was hot and burnt my tongue, but my tongue decided it was in a good cause.
‘Ot is ip?’ I asked.
‘Just kurrajong roots ground to a paste, mixed with some native raspberries for sweetening and a little procoptodon fat,’ Miss Richards said casually. ‘And I found some edible wattle seeds and Bruce helped me grind them into flour,’ she smiled at Bruce over the flames, ‘and I baked them into a sort of flat bread on the rocks.’
Chunks of roast procoptodon in wattle-seed pancakes with chopped watercress is almost like chicken kebabs on Lebanese bread with garlic sauce and tabouli. Well, actually, it isn’t much like it at all, but I was hungry and it wasn’t that bad.
The air grew cooler, but it was warm around the fire. I was just reaching for my third not-really-kebab when Phredde whispered, ‘Look over there!’
I looked. By now I was expecting a herd of who-knows-what-osauruses or fanged leopards about to leap onto us and try to eat us, but it was just the herd of procoptodons grazing beneath the trees. They looked peaceful and sort of cute, even if they did have flat faces. I hoped they wouldn’t recognise their friend on our spit, and it looked like they didn’t. Up in the trees some animals that looked like possums—maybe they even were—chattered and raced along the branches. Down the hill the river glinted as the moon rose and---
‘Wombats!’ whispered Phredde.
Well, they didn’t look like wombats to me—their noses were too long and they had stripes and silly little tails,14 but they were eating grass just like proper wombats, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t matter if they looked like tiny rhinoceroses in disguise.
Suddenly Bruce’s tongue darted out and speared a mosquito. (That’s one good thing about having a barbecue with Bruce—no flies or mozzies survive to crawl on you.) He’d also eaten some of the roast ’roo, just to keep us company, but he’d done pretty well on insects too.
‘I sort of like this place,’ he said, burping happily.
‘Bruce! Manners!’ said Mrs Olsen. But she said it a bit absent-mindedly. She was gazing wistfully at the herd of flat-faced ’roos. Her fangs glinted white in the moonlight. ‘I wonder,’ she said hesitantly, ‘if anyone would mind if I…just had a little taste you know…a tiny, tiny suck at their jugulars…’
‘You want to vampirise the ’roos?’ I asked.
‘Not enough to hurt them,’ said Mrs Olsen hurriedly. ‘Just a snack here, a neck there. They’ll hardly know they’ve been vampirised.’
I looked at the others. Miss Richards was busy tying up bark pillows with lengths of thin green vine. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.
‘Me neither,’ said Bruce.
Phredde shrugged. ‘She has to eat something!’ she whispered.
‘Be our guest,’ I said to Mrs Olsen. ‘Er, the ’roos’ guest anyway.’
‘Don’t look,’ said Mrs Olsen, blushing. ‘Oh, how I hate to do this!’
She darted off into the darkness. There was a thud, of the vampire-meets-kangaroo-neck sort, then a long drawn out sigh.
Mrs Olsen had found her dinner.
* * *
14 Probably Neohelos—Jackie.
Chapter 17
At Home 100,000 Years Ago
You know what? A bracken bed—even with a stringybark pillow—in a mud hut isn’t nearly as comfortable as your own bed in your own castle.
The bracken was scratchy and the ground below hard, and it was cold too, even with the bracken fluffed up all round and over me like Miss Richards suggested.
On either side of me I could hear Phredde or Bruce or maybe it was Miss Richards rolling over as they tried to get comfortable, and outside strange creatures plodded or munched or grunted or sometimes screamed in a terrorised way that shut off fast as something guzzled them.
Only Mrs Olsen seemed to have no trouble sleeping. She’d come back from her dinner hunt sort of bloated and now lay flat on her bracken bed with a big smile on her face and a dribble of bl…, er, red stuff on one side of her mouth. She burped occasionally in her sleep, the happy burp of a teacher who’s vampirised a whole herd of flat-faced ’roos.
‘Phredde?’
‘Mmm?’ said Phredde.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No,’ said Phredde. ‘What’s wrong?’
We’re trapped in who knows when and our teacher has gone feral and I think my boyfriend—well, frogfriend—has a thing for older women. Well, older librarians anyway. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, sniffing back a tear. ‘I’m okay.’
‘I’m okay too,’ whispered Phredde.
You know what? It’s funny, but after that I fell asleep.
The dawn chorus woke us up. You know the dawn chorus—it’s when all the little birds go tweet, tweet, tweet, and sing their little hearts out on the branches outside your bedroom window, while Mr Sun starts his long journey through the sky. (That bit was in a kid’s book Mum read me when I was small. The things they put in kids’ books sometimes!)
Our dawn chorus wasn’t like that at all.
First of all there was a sort of booming squawk, like an emu was having its toenails pulled out with rusty pliers, and then a few screams like a mob of piranhas were catching and eating every little birdie in sight. (If piranhas can skeletonise a cow in ten minutes, it makes you wonder how long they’d take to skeletonise a librarian—no, no, Prudence! I told myself. It’s WRONG to think of throwing librarians in the moat, and anyway the castle moat is at least 100,000 years away.)
Well, what with the shrieking and the booming—and a very few tweet, tweet, tweets—we all woke up, except for Mrs Olsen, who just lay there on her back with her hands crossed over her chest. She still had a smile on her face too.
‘Should we wake her up?’ I whispered.
Miss Richards shook her head. ‘Vampires normally sleep during the day,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the fresh blood that’s done it. She’s reverted.’
‘Reverted to what?’ I asked.
‘A fearsome bloodsucker who stalks the night,’ said Bruce hollowly.
I looked at Mrs Olsen. She did look different lying there.
‘You’re right. Let’s leave her alone,’ I whispered.
Phredde nodded and we all tiptoed out.
The remains of the ’roo were still hanging on the spit where we’d left them. The ’roo didn’t look nearly as tasty this morning. In fact, it looked sort of disgusting, with prehistoric flies crawling all over it.
‘Yum. Breakfast!’ said Bruce. He hopped over to the dead fire, and zapped his tongue away at the flies.
Phredde and I looked away.
‘How about some fresh fish?’ suggested Miss Richards. ‘After you we
nt to bed last night I made a fish trap out of supple young branches tied together. It’s a really clever design—the fish swim into it one way then it gets so narrow they can’t turn around and swim out.’
Well, I couldn’t care less about fish-trap designs, but I did feel like some fresh fish. So the three of us wandered down to the riverbank—okay, Miss Richards and I wandered and Phredde fluttered through the rising mist like a cartoon that had got lost from Hollywood.
We had a swim before we checked the traps, in the hope we might manage to scare a few more fish into them, and also because the water felt nice.
‘See?’ I said after Miss Richards had jumped in after us. ‘I said it was warm!’
Miss Richards nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if there are any thermal springs near here.’
‘What’s a thermal spring?’ asked Phredde, fluttering just above the surface of the river so she could kick water in my face when I wasn’t looking.
‘Places where warm water rises from deep underground. They’re often associated with volcanic activity.’
‘Volcanoes!’ I yelled. I gazed around, but there wasn’t any smoke rising from the hills or great red lava flows coming towards us. ‘I thought there weren’t any volcanoes in Australia.’
‘Not for about 7000 years around here,’ said Miss Richards.
‘But we’re more than 100,000 years in the past so there might be some volcanoes now…’
‘I don’t think you need worry.’ Miss Richards rolled over and began to backstroke happily across the river. ‘Places like the North Island in New Zealand have hot springs, but there’s only a volcanic eruption every fifty years or so.’
‘Every fifty years!’ I squeaked.
‘Not across the whole island! Really, it’s quite safe! Just enjoy the warm water. It’s probably flowing down from a hot spring miles and miles away anyway.’
I took another good look around. But the horizon still seemed volcano-less. So I started to think about breakfast instead.
It wasn’t really a surprise when it turned out Miss Richards’s fish traps had worked. She’d tied a vine onto them before she’d thrown them in the water and then tied the other end of the vine15 to a tree so they didn’t float away. All we had to do was haul them up and there was our breakfast gazing up at us.
I was a bit afraid that 100,000-year-old fish would still have tentacles, but they looked normal enough, googly eyes and gaping mouths and fins and stuff. You know, like fish.
So Phredde and I looked the other way while Miss Richards bashed them on the head with a rock so they died quickly instead of suffocating up here in the fresh air, then we threaded a long stick through their lips (which was pretty yuk, but the alternative was carrying slippery dead fish in our hands—triple yuk) and hauled them back to camp. There were about a dozen of them, all soft and slippery and scaly.
‘Now, if we hold the fish over the flames on green branches,’ Miss Richards was saying, ‘the scales will singe off, then…aaaarrrrkkkk!’
The aaaarrrrkkkk! was because SOMETHING suddenly leapt out of the tree, onto the cold fly-crusted carcass of the roasted ’roo. Then it turned and snarled at us.
‘The leopard!’ whispered Phredde, her wings buzzing as she shot up into the air and out of the leopard’s reach. ‘It’s come to get its ’roo back!’
The leopard turned to us and snarled again. You could see it had definitely worked out who’d stolen its dinner while it was having a quiet drink by the riverbank—and who’d turned it into a barbecue too.
‘Er…maybe if we apologise!’ I whispered.
‘I don’t think prehistoric leopards understand English,’ croaked Bruce. He always croaks because he’s a frog, but this sounded even more croaky than usual.
The leopard gazed at us, one by one, as though working out exactly which one of us was going to be breakfast instead of its rather diminished kangaroo. Its gaze stopped at me. The leopard slowly padded forward, still staring at me as though working out which bit to chomp first.
‘Er, nice pussy cat,’ I said quickly. ‘Er, there’s a good little pussy cat. Why don’t you have some nice roasted ’roo bones and we’ll all be friends and…’
‘Grrrrrwwwwwlllll,’ said the leopard.
‘Look, really, I don’t taste nice, and there isn’t even any tomato sauce to put on me…’
‘Grrrrwwwwwllll,’ said the leopard.
‘Look…I…er…help!’ I screamed desperately.
The leopard took another step forward, and another…
‘Um, I’ll save you, Prudence,’ croaked Bruce bravely.
‘How?’ I muttered out of the corner of my mouth. ‘Zap a leopard with your tongue? Jump—splott—on its head? Bruce, you’re not the right shape for fighting leopards!’
‘I’ll PING myself into a tiger…’ began Bruce, then remembered. ‘I can’t PING anything, can I?’
‘Nope,’ I said. The leopard was almost within leaping range now. I wondered whether to run or climb a tree, but that leopard could climb, couldn’t it? And I was pretty sure it could run faster than me too.
‘Goodbye, Phredde, Bruce,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t try to save me! Save yourselves…’
‘No way!’ yelled Phredde. She suddenly dived on the leopard and landed plunk on its back. ‘Don’t you look like that at my friend!’ she shrieked, bashing it with her tiny phaery hands.
The leopard took no notice whatsoever.
‘Um, I second that!’ croaked Bruce. He leapt too, right onto the leopard’s head.
You’d have thought that leopard had berserk phaeries and giant frogs on its back every day. It kept its gaze fixed on me.
It crouched down, ready to spring. Its massive jaws opened…
I shut my eyes.
‘Ahhh haiii!’ yelled Miss Richards. I opened my eyes.
Miss Richards was hopping towards the leopard on one leg. The other was sort of hooked up next to her waist but, as I watched, it went zot! right into the leopard’s kidneys!
‘Grrwwlpp!’ the leopard snarled, and swung around towards her.
‘Great shot, Miss Richards!’ I yelled.
‘Haii uppp!’ Miss Richards charged again. I hadn’t seen her so angry since Edwin kept the Encyclopaedia of Fascinating Fishes out until it was three weeks overdue!
Zapo! Bam! Her left leg shot out this time and caught the leopard on the nose. The leopard went cross-eyed for a moment, trying to see what had happened, then stared at her with its big brown eyes.
‘Way to go, Miss Richards!’ yelled Bruce, leaping off the leopard’s back.
‘Yippee!’ shouted Phredde, flying up into the air again.
That’s when the leopard charged. One minute it was just crouching there, the next it leapt right over Bruce and onto Miss Richards even before she could get a karate leg up.
Luckily librarians have pretty fast reflexes. Miss Richards ducked back, so the first giant swipe of the leopard’s claws just ripped her blouse and skirt right down the middle. The leopard raised its claws again and…
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Something with giant feet zoomed into the clearing.
BONGGGGGG! One large leathery leg—not like Miss Richards’s at all—kicked the leopard’s head.
The leopard dropped to the ground.
‘Wha---’ stammered Miss Richards, holding her
blouse together.
‘Glooop! Glopp, glopp, glooop!’
It was as tall as our school library. It had feathers too (well actually, our library doesn’t have feathers—but this did). It looked a bit like an emu on steroids, but even steroids wouldn’t make an emu as giant as this. Or as ferocious.
‘Gloop! Gloopp!’ the giant bird roared, glaring down at the silent leopard. For about two seconds it peered down at us as well, as though considering if we were worth a giant emu kick or not. Then it decided we weren’t. With one last scornful look at the leopard it grabbed the ’roo carcass in its massive beak then strode off with it through the trees, leaving a stunn
ed librarian, a shaky kid, an amazed phaery, a frog with its mouth open and a dead-looking leopard behind it. We listened to the thud of its footbeats slowly dying away, and a final booming: ‘Gloop! Glopp!’
‘Wha…what was that!’ stammered Phredde shakily.
‘A prehistoric superhero?’ I whispered. ‘But with feathers.’
Miss Richards fumbled with her laptop. Her face was white and bleeding a bit where the leopard had scratched it. She looked pretty stunned too. ‘That,’ she said, as she scrolled down the screen, ‘was a Bullockornis planei, otherwise known as a mihirung or thunder bird or…’ she gulped, ‘a Demon Duck of Doom!’
* * *
15 Probably young wonga wonga vine or clematis—Jackie.
Chapter 18
The Demon Duck of Doom
It was like those days back in the library when we were in kindergarten, all of us crowded round the librarian while she read us a nice story. A bit like it anyway. Well, okay, it wasn’t like it at all.
Instead of a nice school library with carpet on the floor and posters and kids’ artwork all round the place and a nice school tuckshop just outside and pizza bars down the road, we sat on our stone seats 100,000 years ago with a mud hut behind us while Miss Richards read to us from the computer screen. ‘The Demon Duck of Doom was two metres high,’ she read.
‘Sounds about right,’ muttered Bruce.
‘And weighed about 300 kilograms.’
‘Who the heck is going to haul one of those onto the scales and weigh it!’ whispered Phredde.
‘These gigantic flightless birds…’
(I sighed in relief. The thought of one of those flying over us was a bit…well, terrifying…)
‘…roamed Australia from 25 million to about 30,000 years ago, or even as late as 6000 years ago. They were one of the biggest birds that ever lived.’
‘Oh, goodie,’ muttered Phredde. ‘At least there isn’t a bigger one around.’
‘There is considerable discussion, however, about what they ate. Some authorities believe they were grass eaters, others that they preferred fruit, while some believe they were carnivores either killing their prey or scavenging dead meat that other beasts had killed.’
The Phredde Collection Page 38