by Ian Whybrow
Bundle, Zora and Quickpaws were fascinated by the strange antics of these large creatures. In no time they plucked up the courage to try some of the broken bits of boiled egg that were held out for them to nibble.
As for Trouble, he soon got bored. He was far more interested in the big red thing floating above the Vroom-vroom.
He slipped away without anyone noticing, and in two shakes of a rock-python’s tail, he had hopped on board the basket.
Chapter 8
“Trouble, where are you? You come back here!” shouted Mimi. She and her brothers had been sent on an urgent rescue mission with orders to find the runaway and return him to his mama and papa immediately. The kits clambered, panting, over the sides of the big, square nest woven out of wickerwork. There was no sign of him at all.
Suddenly, they heard a rustle coming from inside what you or I would recognise as a large handbag. “Come out of there at once!” Skeema ordered. “Your mama and papa are very worried about you!”
“Mind The Silent Enemy doesn’t swoop down and peck your eye out,” added Little Dream. “Like what happened to your papa when he was young and all by himself with no one keeping a look-out for him!”
“Peck eye out,” came a sad muffled voice from inside the bag.
“We meerkats have to stick together to stay alive,” Skeema reminded him.
“Stay alive,” came the muffled voice, but still he didn’t come out.
Mimi reached in and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.
“Yikes!” She got rather a shock. Trouble had stumbled on some make-up in the Blahblah’s bag and had smothered himself in bright colours. There was black on his cheeks and a black line between his eyes, red and brown all over his body.
“Ha ha!” laughed Skeema. “He looks like a little wild dog! What a fine disguise!”
“Find da skies!” echoed Trouble.
“What else have we got in here?” asked Skeema. He burrowed into the bag at once. It was rather a squash because Little Dream had decided to have a look at the same time.
“This reminds me of the time I sneaked a look round an empty jackal’s lair,” giggled Little Dream, rummaging away. “They steal things from Blah-blahs, you know. They go for shiny stuff like this.” And indeed the Blah-blah’s bag was full of bits and pieces that shone and sparkled, a treasure trove of things they had never seen before…
“Hey! What about this?” he added. “This is the shiniest thing.”
“Baggsie me have that!” cried Skeema and popped out to look at it properly in the light. Little Dream didn’t mind. To him, the sprays and the lipstick were strange beetles in hard, bright shells. They looked delicious.
As for Skeema, he was delighted with his chain that had a flat polished stone hanging from it. He held the stone up to his eye and found that he could see right through it!
Trouble squealed with fright.
“What’s up with him, Mimi?” Skeema asked, seeing the baby clinging to her for dear life.
“Your eye!” she told him. “It’s grown as big as a kudu’s!”
“Really?” said Skeema, putting down the little magnifying glass. “My eye feels quite normal to me.”
“Well, it is, now that you’ve stopped looking through that pebble,” said Mimi.
“How odd!” said Skeema, and looked at Little Dream through it. “Oo-er, Dreamie!” he said. “You’ve turned into a big baboon!”
“Give it to me! I want it!” cried Mimi, trying to put the chain round her neck. “I’ve been wishing and wishing for something nice to wear to go with the quills and feathers on my headband.”
“No way!” declared Skeema, snatching it back, and putting the chain round his neck instead. “Why should you get all the interesting things?”
“Because I’m a princess! I need special things!” came the angry answer.
“What about this?” suggested Little Dream, popping out of the bag with his latest find. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s nice and soft.” This was his first sighting of a pair of leopard-print knickers.
It was Mimi’s too, and she cheered up at once. “Perfect! It’s for carrying babies!” she declared. “Hop in the baby-carrier, Trouble, and I’ll take you home in it. Pop those squirty things in too,” she added, taking the spray bottles from him and putting them, and Trouble, in her new baby-carrier.
Little Dream was chewing away at one of his finds. “Disgusting!” he spluttered and spat it out.
“I say! What’s happened to your lips, Dreamie?” asked Skeema. They had gone bright red.
“Just as I thought. There was a millipede hiding in this hard shell,” said Little Dream, holding it up, “but it tastes horrible! But look at this! Hurray! A Blah-blah eye-protector!” he shouted, casting the millipede to one side. And he put the strap of the little camcorder round his neck.
Suddenly, a violent gust of wind caught the balloon. The tether-rope that anchored it to the bumper-bars of the pickup truck was stretched tight and everyone was thrown about.
Trouble gave a squeal as Mimi staggered. He tried to cling to the side of the nest. Instead, he pulled down a switch and
SHHHHRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
A great tongue of flame came roaring out of the burner and swelled the drooping canopy overhead. In an instant, it was puffed up like a giant ostrich egg.
“Everybody out! Run for your lives!” yelled Skeema and dived over the side.
But it was too late for the others. With a rip and a twang and a tearing of metal, the tether-rope snapped the bar it was tied to, and the balloon shot into the air.
Chapter 9
Rocketing through the blue like furry astronauts, Mimi, Little Dream and baby Trouble thought the end had come.
For a while, they lay bundled up together in the bottom of the basket, scared to death by the terrible noise and the leaping fire above their heads. “I’m going up too fast!” wailed Mimi. “I’m going to hit the sun!”
It was Little Dream who gathered his thoughts together first. “What did you touch?” he yelled into the pouch on his sister’s back. “Can you show me, Trouble?”
Trouble’s head appeared, his bright eyes blinking nervously.
“Show you,” he said quietly, pointing his nose in the direction of something shiny sticking out of one of the nest’s walls.
“You mean this?” yelled Little Dream, and gave it a poke upwards. Immediately the horrible noise stopped and the flame went away.
For a moment, there was a wonderful hush. And then there came a faint cry from just below them. “Helk! Helk!”
“That sounds like Skeema!” said Mimi. “And he’s in trouble! Where is he?”
Three corners of the basket were taken up by liquid-gas cylinders, but there was a hole in the other one, so Mimi and Little Dream were able to put their heads out and look down. The shock of what they saw took their breath away.
Below them, Uncle Fearless and Radiant and the three babies they were holding were not much bigger than dung-beetles. The truck and the horrified-looking professor and Miss Daniela Pipistrella were shrinking fast. They rapidly went from baboon-size to meerkat-size to lizard-size to beetle-size to ant-size. The wrinkly mounds in front of Whiffy Old Scrape were fast becoming – well – just wrinkles.
The cliff that towered above the burrow became a long, shadowy line and the grassy plain came into view, stretching away to the mountains.
“Wow,” said Mimi. “This is scary! What’s that whopping great grey-blue cloud down there? Termites?”
“Gildegeeste,” came Skeema’s voice again. “A huge big crowd of them nunning together!”
“Where are you, Skeema? And why are you talking funny?” called Mimi.
“Here I ang! Down here!” came Skeema’s voice, sounding more and more agitated.
SKWEEEEE! came Snap-snap’s war-cry.
It was then that Mimi caught sight of her brother hanging on for dear life to the tether-rope, with Snap-snap squeezed between his teeth.
�
��Can you climb up?” asked Little Dream. “You’ll be safer in here with us. Do try!” And so Skeema struggled up the tether-rope, up the wickerwork sides of the basket – and it wasn’t long before Little Dream and Mimi had their teeth in the furry scruff of Skeema’s neck and were hauling him back into the nest.
“Thanks!” puffed Skeema, putting Snap-snap down safely on the floor. “Phew! What’s going on, exactly?”
He couldn’t help noticing that Little Dream had a blissful smile on his face. “Look here, Dreamie!” he said indignantly. “We’re all in a very tight spot! What are you smiling about?”
“We’re flying!” said Dreamie. “This is what I dreamed about. Isn’t it lovely?”
“Nubbly,” echoed Trouble.
“Is that what I’m doing?” asked Mimi. “I say! It is rather fun!” She climbed up the side of the basket so that she and Trouble could get a better view. “So that moving lake down there, the one made out of black and white stripes. That must be...”
“Zebra,” said Skeema. “Hundreds of them. It’s just like Uncle always says,” he continued in hushed tones. “You can’t tell where one of them stops and the next one starts. Brilliant, eh? It must be very confusing for lions, don’t you think? They must find it jolly hard to know where to pounce!”
It didn’t take long before he began to enjoy himself too. “I see what you mean about this flying business, Dreamie,” he said. “It’s a bit like swimming, really, isn’t it? Only not so wet, of course. I didn’t think it would be this quiet, though. Listen.”
They strained their ears and they could make out the rumble of hooves, a distant mooing, a whinny, a faint yap – that sort of thing, but all very far away.
“It is lovely, Dreamie,” said Skeema quietly, “but how are we going to get down?”
“Oh, dear,” Little Dream muttered. “We’re all alone, and we haven’t got a single bolthole to run to. If only Uncle were here to tell us what to do!”
Chapter 10
At the moment when the wind jerked the kits and their precious naughty baby high into the air, Radiant and Fearless felt completely helpless.
“Surely there’s something we can do, Fearless, my love!” Radiant said at last as the balloon began to shrink into the distant sky. “We can’t just let them go like that!”
Fearless was in shock. All at once he found himself reliving the terrifying moment when he was caught off-guard by The Silent Enemy and had been swept up into the air himself. He felt the shocking rush of that vertical take-off in his belly. His paw went up to his empty eye-socket as if to protect his eye from a cruel hooked beak. He remembered the struggle to get his claws and teeth into the enemy and how he had fallen then, tumbling over and over in the air until the ground came up with a sickening crash. The pain was suddenly as bad as if it had just happened.
It was all he could do to stop himself from trembling. But then he gave himself a shake-up that sent electric sparks crackling through his puffed-out coat of fur. He was Fearless again.
“Stand by! No time to waste!” he declared. “We must go after them immediately!”
“Right away, my love! We mustn’t lose heart,” said Radiant. “Whatever it takes, we’ll find them!”
“Whatever it takes!” said Uncle, managing a smile.
“And no matter how far!” said Radiant, blinking away a tear.
“Then we shall have to go like the wind, what-what!” declared Uncle.
Suddenly, the Blah-blahs leaped into their Vroom-vroom and made it roar. Radiant and the babies flinched.
“By all that jars and makes you jump!” exclaimed Fearless. “Those Blah-blahs must be going after their nest! And if anything can run like the wind, it’s one of those Vroom-vrooms! Come on! We must get on it somehow!”
Already, the pickup had begun to move, but away they went after it, fur flying, ready to risk everything to keep the Really Mads together.
“Professor! Did you see what I just saw?” exclaimed Daniela Pipistrella, tightening her seatbelt as the pickup began to gather speed. “In the rear-view mirror, I mean?”
“If you mean, did I see a bunch of meerkats hopping into the back, then I certainly did!” he replied with a chuckle. He glanced in the mirror again, but could see little more than a billowing cloud of sand thrown up behind.
“Those little meerkats never cease to amaze me,” he went on. “See if you can get a few snaps of them, will you? Now, if we’re going to catch up with that blessed cloud-hopper of yours before nightfall, I shall have to put my foot down. Hang on!”
Vrooom – vrroooom!
Chapter 11
And hang on is just what Skeema, Mimi, Little Dream and Trouble were doing, as their balloon flew across the endless sands of the Kalahari.
“Why can’t we hear the wind?” asked Little Dream.
“I think it must be because we’re riding on it,” said Skeema.
There was a whirring sound. Some bright parrots flapped past, squawking and arguing. Next came a flock of elegant egrets and some dazzlingly white avocets; then a crowd of purple glossy starlings, chip-chipping away.
“All right, mate? All right, mate?”
“All right, mate!” chirped Trouble, popping up and showing his painted face. He got one or two rather old-fashioned looks before the nervous birds tipped their wings and darted off across the blue.
“This nest we’re in,” said Mimi. “It was roaring before. How come it’s stopped roaring?”
“And spitting fire!” said Skeema enthusiastically. “What’s happened to the fire?”
“The fire just sort of popped down into its burrow when I flipped this thing,” said Little Dream, indicating the switch.
“I wish I knew how to make fire! Then I could scatter all our enemies and Radiant wouldn’t need to worry about the Really Mads needing more fighters.”
“Why don’t you wish for something more useful – like us being able to get down from here,” demanded Mimi.
“Why don’t you just be quiet for once?” replied Skeema angrily.
Little Dream was ignoring them both and playing with his new eye-protector. “I had one of these once that went flash,” he muttered half to himself. He tried pressing a button on the top and was pleasantly surprised. It began to whirr, a bit like grasshoppers do before you bite their heads off. And he found he could see through a window at the back into a little world that was exactly like the world below, only much smaller. It was very soothing.
He was shocked out of his trance by some very excited and rather angry squawking and flapping.
“Oo-er,” he said, as he lifted the eye-protector and found that its window was full of strange-looking pink birds.
“Eek! I’m in the middle of a flock of flamingos!” cried Mimi.
“Bingos!” repeated Trouble, rather fascinated.
None of the meerkats had ever been this close to a crowd of flamingos before, and they came as a bit of a shock. There was something about the way their necks stretched out in front and their long, skinny legs trailed out behind them that Skeema didn’t like. As for the horrid flat, webbed feet floating along on the ends of those legs, they looked as if they could give you a nasty slap! And worse than their big feet were their giant, hooked beaks and their mad round eyes…
“How’re you doing, ladies?” asked Skeema with a gulp, hoping that a bit of charm might stall them if they were about to attack.
“Hoy! Do you mind?” said one of the birds flapping right alongside the basket. “I may be pink, but I am a big tough bloke, so you watch it.”
“You wochit!” echoed Trouble.
“Right, sonny,” said the nearest flamingo, dipping one black-tipped wing to bring himself even closer to the basket. “You are going to get a beak up the bracket for that!”
Trouble decided not to wait around to find out where his bracket was. He popped out of his baby-carrier like a cork out of a bottle and grabbed the red cord that hung down from above. There was a ripping sound as the top of the can
opy opened up. Hot air rushed out through the hole and the balloon dropped like a stone.
Chapter 12
“EEEEEEEEEEEK!” squealed Skeema, Mimi and Little Dream, feeling that their tummy-pads had been sucked out through the hole in the canopy with the hot air.
Trouble made a similar sound as he swung on the red cord and sicked up his breakfast at the same time.
“See if you can get the fire to roar again, Little Dream!” cried Skeema. “That might make us go up instead of down.”
Little Dream strained to move the switch. “No good,” he grunted. “It won’t budge.”
“Trouble! Get back in your carrier NOW!” ordered Mimi in her bossiest voice. Amazingly, that did the trick and Trouble did as he was told. He let go of the red cord and dropped back into his carrier with a plop.
Straight away the hole in the top of the canopy closed and the balloon stopped falling and levelled out. The trouble was, now that it was closer to the ground, things seemed to be rushing at it even faster than before. The kits peered out and found that they could recognise where they were. A curving gash of rippling blue cut through the desert below. “Look. That must be Wild River!” gasped Skeema, as things began to make sense to him.
Little Dream began to recognise things too. “Those round silver things leading off into the distance like shimmering stepping stones must be the salt pans! We ran across them once, before the rains came. Do you remember?” said Little Dream excitedly.
“When I had that dream about following Mama’s footsteps and we found some footsteps to follow, only they weren’t Mama’s, they were made by––”
“Griff!” interrupted Mimi. “Down there, by those shady trees, look! I’m sure it’s him!” She called to him as loudly as she could and the others joined in: “Griff! GRIFF!”
And sure enough, stretched out in the cooling shade, lay a lion cub protected by three lionesses. It just had to be their sweet-tempered lion-cub friend, now safely reunited with his mama and two aunts – The Three Graces.