Cosmic Camel

by Emma Laybourn

  “My raincoat!” exclaimed Donal, straightening up. The raincoat was shuffling and wriggling across the ground, while Brola jumped alongside it, shouting:

  “How dare you! Stop making fun of me! Come out from under there!”

  She snatched at the coat, but it twirled away, and flapped across the grass past Donal and Ulan Nuur. Despite Donal’s bewilderment, he couldn’t help laughing.

  “I did not hide under the coat!” squealed Brola, waddling furiously after it.

  The crowd of Meerie watched in puzzlement. Then, like grass rippling in a sudden wind, they shifted to follow Brola and the dancing coat, and poured in a green flood past Donal. The Skywheel, left exposed by the ebbing tide of Meerie, sat high and dry on its stone slab.

  Ulan Nuur stood up and gave his leg an experimental shake. “Come along,” he said, as he began to stroll towards the slab. “Time to go. Don’t forget your bag.”

  “But hang on,” said Donal, hurrying alongside him. His hand was still resting on the camel’s back as Ulan Nuur reached the Skywheel and bent his nose down to it. “Hang on, what about the–”

  WHOOMPH

  Chapter Eighteen

  “–lemming?” finished Donal, breathless in the dark.

  “Who do you think was under your coat?”

  “But we can’t leave the lemming behind!”

  “I think it knew what it was doing,” said Ulan Nuur.

  “You mean it sacrificed itself so that we could get away?” The Skywheel’s walls cleared to reveal a horde of stunned and angry Meerie down below, shaking their arms like a forest of stubby grey branches.

  Donal’s raincoat lay limp on the Greengrass. He couldn’t see the lemming anywhere.

  And then they were sailing away until the Meerie became just a distant shrubbery in the middle of a green meadow. Soon they could not be seen at all.

  “I don’t know about sacrifice,” said Ulan Nuur. “I think it may be quite happy to stay. Now, you had better program this ship to go back to Earth.”

  “Let me think,” said Donal. He put his hands to his head. Palzack and Ulan Nuur thought he was resourceful, so he had better be resourceful… He tried to remember what Brola had told him. “Set if for Out, not Level, and then sector nine… first planetary system,” he muttered.

  He went to the control panel, counted the segments on it carefully, took a breath, and touched the screen.

  “Artificial gravity on,” rustled the ship.

  “Let’s hope this works. If we can just get within sight of Earth, I can guide us home. I know my way around the globe all right. And I know where the Zoo is on the map – we had to plan the route to it at school. It’s finding Earth that’s the tricky bit…”

  “We are bound to find somewhere,” said Ulan Nuur composedly.

  “I feel a bit sick,” said Donal, watching a thousand stars crawl past. “Ulan Nuur? Can you tell me some more about the Gobi Desert, to take my mind off it?”

  The camel closed his eyes and cleared his throat. As he began to speak, Donal pulled his clipboard from the rucksack, found a fresh sheet of paper, and started to draw.

  The Gobi Desert was riddled with burrows, said Ulan Nuur; marmots popped in and out of them as quick as blinking. Elsewhere the massive bones of long-dead animals lay scattered in the sand, wind-scoured: and long-abandoned nests still full of eggs, so old, said Ulan Nuur, that if you could believe it, they had turned to stone.

  He told Donal of the camel herders living in their round, felt tents, of the laughing, red-cheeked children who learnt to ride the camels before they could walk. He told of treks a thousand miles long, beneath icy clear skies as blue and hard as diamonds.

  And all the while he told his tales, Donal drew, slowly, carefully. At the pencil’s point the camel grew: his shaggy hair, like an old coat about to slip off, his callused knees, his proudly curved nose, his deep and thoughtful eyes.

  “Hyperspace jump,” breathed the ship’s controls. “Ten… Nine… eight…”

  “It’s finished,” said Donal, holding up the portrait, as they were plunged into darkness once again. He held his breath to see what would appear on the other side of hyperspace.

  “Behind you,” said the camel.

  Donal spun round and beheld a globe of swirling white and blue, growing larger by the minute.

  “Earth!”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Ulan Nuur.

  “It is! There’s India, and those must be the Himalayas, and above that – Ulan Nuur! That must be Mongolia, and the Gobi Desert! You can see your home from here!”

  The camel put his face down to the floor, gazing long and hard. At last he let out a quiet sigh.

  Donal opened his rucksack and began to stow away his clipboard and pencil, along with the flask. Trapped in his lunch-box was a scrap of soft, grey fur.

  “Oh, dear,” he said remorsefully. “Poor lemming, left all on its own.”

  * * *

  The lemming sat up by the stream and cleaned her whiskers. She felt very pleased with herself. Not only was her stomach full of Greengrass, but her burrow in the riverbank was nearly finished.

  Her den, lined with camel hair, was warm and snug. This would be a good place to bring up her young family; no foxes, no stoats, no hawks or owls… The Meerie were too toothless and clumsy to pose any threat. And there was food galore.

  She closed her eyes contentedly and basked in the orange sunset, dreaming of a green land swarming with happy lemmings, while her unborn babies kicked impatiently inside her.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Donal sat by his rucksack on the grass…

  …Tired, dull, dusty grass, scattered with lollipop sticks and crisp packets. Next to the wire fence nearby was a small, newly-drilled hole in the ground, about the size of a tennis ball. A pair of long-lashed eyes watched through the fence as the last gleam of the Skywheel sank out of sight.

  The camel looked up and regarded Donal solemnly.

  “Better put that translator away,” he said.

  Donal felt for the silver box around his neck. He squeezed it to switch it off, slipped it over his head and buried it in his rucksack. “That better?”

  “Hrrungh.”

  “What?”

  “Rarunngh!” insisted the camel, stretching out his long neck.

  Donal followed his gaze. Mrs Hendry was bearing down on him, along with Toby’s Mum and her group.

  “Oh, no!” he said. “Now I’m for it!” As he scrambled guiltily to his feet, he checked his watch and frowned.

  How could only twenty minutes have passed since he had last been here? “Hyperspace,” he muttered. “Speed of light, or something.”

  “What’s that?” asked Mrs Hendry. “Donal, did you get lost?” She didn’t sound as angry as usual, and Donal took heart.

  “I got left behind in the monkey house,” he said, “and I didn’t know where to find the others. Sorry, Mrs Hendry! I didn’t mean to be so slow.”

  “But where have you been?” squealed Toby’s Mum. She looked almost as pink as her coat.

  “I’ve been with this camel the whole time,” said Donal.

  “But you can’t have been, you silly boy, we’ve been looking all over–”

  Mrs Hendry silenced Toby’s Mum with a glance.

  “It was very sensible of you to stay put, Donal,” she said. “I thought you couldn’t be too far away. And what have you been doing here?”

  Donal held out his clip-board. She looked at it, and gasped.

  “Why, Donal – what a beautiful drawing! So careful! It’s this camel to the life!” She held up the picture for the other children to see. “I had no idea you could draw like that, Donal.”

  “I just need a bit of time,” he said.

  “Well, you certainly haven’t been wasting your time here,” said Mrs Hendry, and she smiled at him.

  “I know all about camels,” Toby put in. “They live in the Sahara Desert and they can go for months wi
thout a drink.”

  “Only about a week,” corrected Donal. “And this camel comes from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. That’s why it’s got such thick fur, because it’s cold there. It’s a Bactrian camel, not a dromedary. Dromedaries only have one hump.”

  “Quite right, Donal,” said Mrs Hendry, reading the information board. “I’m glad you’ve taken the trouble to find out instead of assuming you know all about it.”

  The camel looked down its nose at Toby, and spat rather close to his feet.

  “You’re wrong about one thing, though, Donal,” continued Mrs Hendry. “This camel doesn’t come from the Gobi Desert. It’s spent all its life in the zoo. See here? It says, ‘Humphrey, our Bactrian camel, was born and raised in captivity.’ He’s never seen the desert.”

  She handed Donal’s picture back. “Good work, Donal. Now I’d like you to join Nicky’s Mum and go round with her group for the rest of the day.”

  Nicky’s Mum was plump and slow and friendly. Nicky’s group grinned at him cheerfully. “All right,” said Donal.

  Then he remembered something. “Oh, Mrs Hendry?” he added anxiously. “I noticed that this camel’s injured – it’s got a bad cut on its leg. Can we tell somebody so that they’ll look after it?”

  “Well spotted, Donal!” she said, peering at Ulan Nuur’s leg. “We’ll go and find a keeper and let him know. Come along, now, everyone! Back into your groups.” She began to herd them away.

  Donal, stooping to fasten his rucksack, glanced up at the camel.

  “Be seeing you, Ulan Nuur,” he murmured. “I’ll be back.” He carefully noted the spot where the Skywheel had sunk into the ground. If it hadn’t gone too far down, perhaps he could still reach it…

  He wouldn’t mind doing a bit of exploring with Ulan Nuur. “We could start with the Gobi,” he said softly. The camel blinked at him slowly, and rumbled deep in his throat.

  “What a scruffy old specimen!” said Toby scornfully. “Only a donkey-brain would draw a portrait of that horrible old thing.”

  Donal looked at him. Toby’s words should have hurt him, but they didn’t. They didn’t matter. Toby hadn’t just piloted a spaceship half way across the galaxy. Toby hadn’t met a single alien. Toby didn’t have a translator in his rucksack. And Toby didn’t have a camel he could call a friend.

  Come to think of it, Toby didn’t have many real friends at all, because nobody trusted him. Donal felt a little sorry for Toby. But only a little.

  Toby was looking put out. “Didn’t you hear me?” he said. “That camel looks stupid. The dromedaries are proper camels.”

  “Actually,” said Donal as he hefted his rucksack onto his shoulders, “You don’t know anything about it. Bactrian camels are much rarer than mere dromedaries… And, of course, far more intelligent.”

  And he winked at Ulan Nuur and strolled away.

  THE END

  Thank you for reading Cosmic Camel.

  If you enjoyed it, please look for more of Emma Laybourn’s books at your favourite ebook store,

  or visit Emma’s website at www.megamousebooks.com

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