The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles

by S A Wakefield

  ‘Not bad for a beginner, Willi,’ he was told, ‘though you have a lot to learn.’

  ‘Then we’ll find the mother lyrebird’s nest and see when the chick is going to start lessons,’ he said. ‘I will be a Supergumble! I’ll practise every day.’

  ‘Wait! Someone’s coming,’ said Happigumble.

  Near them the fern fronds were swaying, moved by something bigger than Lyrebird, something padding very quietly. A gleam of chestnut red showed through the fern. Fox! Fox had no friends in the bush. He was very cunning, and a clever hunter; sometimes he killed for sport. So the Gumbles froze into the fern, and in the middle of the mound little Willi wished that his shimmery fern frond was a great tree to hide him. But the Gumbles were not afraid of being eaten.

  Though plump, they are too squashy for the taste of meat-eaters. The peculiar thing about them is that they can be stretched or squeezed to any shape without hurting, and if squeezed hard they cannot pop back to their proper Gumbleshapes unless helped. Nearly all the bush creatures are friendly with the squashy, cheerful Gumbles. Fox was different. They never trusted Fox, never made friends.

  Fox stepped on to the mound and turned his sharp face into the fern, as if he knew the Gumbles were hiding there. Willi tried to stand motionless but his tail-fern shivered from fright. Fox sniffed him all over, paused a moment, then walked unhurriedly away.

  The Gumbles rushed to Willi, dusted him and fussed. He was all right, though, apart from being a little shaky. ‘Grasshoppers! I never want that to happen again! I thought he was going to bite my head off.’

  ‘Lucky Willi’s a Gumble and not a real lyrebird chick!’

  ‘But if there is a lyrebird chick,’ Happigumble said slowly, ‘Fox might have eaten it already.’

  When he was hungry, the Gumbles knew, Fox ate almost anything he could catch.

  ‘My dancing lessons!’ squeaked Willi. ‘Quick! We must find that nest and see if everything’s all right.’

  Near the edge of the dense bush a cliff of grey rocks rose, carved and hollowed by weather into smooth shapes and shallow caves. The Gumbles searched along the foot of it, clambering boulders and fallen logs, and presently they found the lyrebird’s nest, high up, concealed beneath an overhanging rock. To reach it they crept along a ledge until they were standing in the little yellow cave where the nest was, roofed and weatherproofed with fern stems and moss, the opening facing outwards.

  Willigumble put his head in and called, ‘Anyone home?’ and pulled it out again rather quickly. ‘There is a lyrebird chick! And he’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. He’s all beak and squawk and hardly any feathers.’

  ‘He will be all right when he grows,’ Willi was told.

  ‘I don’t want dancing lessons with a thing like that! He is as ugly as a Bottersnike. Nearly.’

  A shrill ‘chip chip’ came from inside the nest, angry, or alarmed, or both.

  ‘He can’t even sing yet!’ Willigumble said.

  At the sound of her chick’s cry the mother lyrebird arrived almost at once with a beakful of worms, half flying, half bounding from the ground below. She was not alarmed at seeing her visitors were Gumbles, and when she had stuffed the worms into her little monster’s gaping beak she was able to say: ‘Isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he just like his pa?’

  ‘He hasn’t got any feathers much,’ Willigumble complained.

  ‘And might be cold when the winds blow,’ Happigumble added quickly.

  ‘He will not!’ the mother said. ‘I have lined the nest with feathers of my own.’

  Willigumble asked, not quite so eagerly now: ‘Are you going to teach him to sing and dance?’

  ‘Sing and dance! We have no time for those capers, baby and me.’ From a small pouch in her throat Lyrebird produced more food which the chick gobbled in a second. ‘We have such a lot of growing to do first, haven’t we? But there is nothing wrong with our appetite.’

  ‘Speaking of appetites,’ said Happigumble gravely, ‘we’ve bad news. Fox is back.’

  This did not seem to worry the mother at all. Tinkingumble explained: ‘What we’re afraid of is that while you’re away finding worms Fox might climb the ledge, like we did, and … raid the nest,’ and gobble up that chick, chip and all, they thought, but did not say, which would be very sad, because though he is a little monster now he will grow into a beautiful dancer, and the world needs beautiful things.

  ‘Chip chip!’ went the chick loudly.

  ‘Still hungry!’ the mother said. And she looked tired. ‘Isn’t he the bonny boy, with the best appetite you ever saw?’ She glided to the ground, rather clumsily because her tail, which was her rudder, was bent from long hours of brooding in the nest.

  ‘It is not safe to leave Chip-Chip alone. Not with Fox around,’ Happigumble said anxiously.

  ‘What can she do?’ said Tinkingumble. ‘She must go away to find worms for that huge appetite of his.’

  ‘It is a pity the father won’t help. One of them could find food while the other guarded the nest, if he wasn’t all the time singing and dancing.’

  ‘But he is a Superbird,’ Willigumble said stoutly. ‘And I’m going to be a Supergumble.’

  Happigumble decided for them all, as he often did. ‘There is only one thing for it. We shall have to guard the nest. Until Chip-Chip is fledged or until Fox goes away. No fun and games for a while! We’ve got an important job to do,’ and they put their heads together to decide how the nest should be guarded from that cunning enemy, Fox.

  Willigumble sighed. Guard duty over an ugly chick, while it squeaked and gobbled worms and slowly, slowly grew its feathers, was not his idea of fun for a young Supergumble. But what the others did Willi did too, though he made fun and games of it wherever he could; and when he saw a piece of string that happened to be dangling by the mouth of the cave he jumped to reach it, and discovered that he could swing whee up, whee back, over the heads of the others as they seriously discussed Fox.

  ‘… too high for him to jump,’ Happigumble was saying, ‘so Chip-Chip would be quite safe if we can stop Fox climbing up the ledge. Now how do we do that?’ Plenty of ideas popped up. Build a barricade! Pelt him with rocks! Tink, make the ledge slippery! Build a barrier of brambles! Make a booby trap of stones to fall on him!

  ‘Chip-Chip’s nest will be as safe as a bank, ho ho!’ Tinkingumble chuckled, ‘with us on the job.’

  ‘And while we’re on the job we’re not going to get caught by the Bottersnikes,’ Happigumble said. ‘Do you hear? Everyone must be extra careful.’

  ‘We always are!’

  ‘Let’s get busy then. You too, Willi. Willigumble? Willigumble! Where’s he gone, bother his head?’

  ‘Here’s a string,’ said Tink. ‘Perhaps he climbed up. Thinking he was a Supergumble.’

  They looked at the string, and wondered. Why should it be there, so close to the nest? What was at the other end of it? From the cave these puzzles could not be answered. Recognizing a ball of fur high in a nearby tree as one of their friends, they yelled: ‘Hey, Koala! Can you see where that string comes from?’

  ‘Yairs,’ said Koala sleepily.

  The Gumbles tried not to sound impatient — Koala was a slow fellow, not to be hurried.

  ‘Tell us about it, Koala.’

  ‘A … creature … is holding the end. On the cliff top, right over your heads.’

  ‘What sort of a creature?’

  ‘A fat thing … ungoodlooking,’ Koala said slowly, like a critic trying to be fair, ‘in fact, as ugly as a lump. It has knobbles all over … a bad cheese for a face … and its tail, you wouldn’t read about it.’

  ‘Long red ears?’ the Gumbles asked.

  ‘Yairs. There are lots of them, all over the rock.’

  ‘Bottersnikes!’ the Gumbles groaned. ‘Wouldn’t it? Just when we have this important job to do.’

  ‘And they’ve caught Willi already, I suppose,’ said Tink gloomily.

  Koala had seen the whole misfortune hap
pen. It began with a rumpus in the bushes up there, leaves trembling, branches splitting, as though a small earthquake was on its way. Bottersnikes hate the bush, hate bushwalking, and do whatever damage they can as they waddle through it. As they crashed out of the scrub on to the flat rocks of the cliff top Koala saw that their ears glowed bright red from anger. They were hunting Gumbles and had found none. Their rusty jam tins, which they had brought to put the Gumbles in when captured, contained nothing. Besides being angry about this they were very tired, for Bottersnikes are most likely the laziest creatures in the world, or anywhere.

  A particularly fat one, who was being carried by two others, came to the edge of the cliff and stared at the miles and miles of treetops that could be seen from that height.

  ‘It is like a sea,’ the King of the Bottersnikes declared.

  Nobody argued.

  ‘Where there is sea there will be fish,’ the King announced. ‘Give me a fishing line.’

  Amongst some rubbish lying near the cliff top a length of string was found. This was tied to a stick and given to his majesty, who threw out with a royal gesture, not bothering about bait. As his line chanced to drop outside the cave where the Gumbles were, the King made a catch almost immediately — Willigumble. The King accepted this piece of good luck as due to his skill as a fisherman.

  ‘Got you!’ he shouted triumphantly, and grabbed Willi off the line and squashed him into a jam tin. Flattened like dough in the tin, Willi had no chance of escape.

  The other Bottersnikes gathered round to peer and poke at the King’s catch. Being too lazy to look after themselves, nothing pleases them more than capturing Gumbles as slaves. One Gumble, however, is not much use to the whole band, and the King announced: ‘I shall now catch the rest and we shall get some work done.’

  After a full minute with no luck the King of the Bottersnikes lost his temper and said: ‘They are there, the Gumbles, I can hear ’em chatterin’. Someone must go down and make ’em bite.’

  The Bottersnikes blinked at this for the cliff was forty feet high and perilous. The King insisted: ‘Someone must go! Smiggles. Wake him up.’

  Smiggles, the dreamer, had just drifted into a peaceful doze on the rock. Often it was as well to keep him awake; some of his dreams were disasters. So the unlucky Smiggles was kicked and jumped on till he woke and with a plastic clothes line tied to his tail pushed over the edge and lowered.

  ‘Great horny dragons!’ the Gumbles cried, scrambling to the back of the cave. ‘They are coming after us.’ They found it quite easy to avoid Smiggles, who could only snatch at air whilst dangling on his rope, but they could not prevent him seeing the lyrebird’s nest as he swung to and fro and — worse — could not stop him looking in. Smiggles too had never beheld anything as ugly as the chick, having never owned a mirror; he gave a shriek and yelled to be hauled up.

  ‘Make those fish bite!’ the King ordered sternly.

  ‘There is a monster down here!’ Smiggles howled. ‘Snapping at me.’

  Slowly, Smiggles was hauled up to face the angry King.

  ‘A monster that went chip chip,’ Smiggles repeated. ‘In a nest. It had black beady eyes that looked at me.’

  Smiggles was a bit simple, everyone knew; but having a monster down there made the King nervous of more fishing. He ordered two heavy Bottersnikes to sit on Smiggles’ head and gave the fishing rod to Chank, with instructions to catch the rest.

  Chank liked to think that his ideas were always better than the King’s. ‘Fishin’!’ he said scornfully. ‘You’ll never ever catch the Gumbles that way.’

  ‘I caught one,’ the King snapped. ‘You ain’t caught any.’

  ‘A small one,’ Chank sneered. ‘The smallest of the lot. The one they call Willigumble.’

  ‘But I’m going to be a Supergumble,’ said Willi, still cheeky though squashed up, ‘and then you’d better watch out.’

  Most of the Bottersnikes snuffled their noses loudly at this, which meant they thought it funny. Not Chank. Willigumble’s boast had given him an idea. Having a smart idea always made Chank as pompous as a big drum. ‘Sending Smiggles down’s no good. What you want here,’ he said grandly, ‘is brain. Which is what I got enough to fill a bag with, while with what Smig’s got you couldn’t raise a blister. Now brain tells me it’s easier for the Gumbles to come up than us to go down; and come up is what I shall make ’em do, by hollerin’ and shoutin’. You lot join in.’ Chank began his hollering and shouting: this he did so well that the Gumbles below had no difficulty in hearing every sound of the fearful racket.

  ‘Having a fight!’ the Gumbles said happily. ‘When they’ve worn themselves out we’ll go and rescue Willi.’

  ‘Yow-waow! Stop it, stop it!’ yelled the voice up top. ‘Please, Willigumble! Stop belting me!’

  The Gumbles’ ears tingled.

  ‘No no, Willi! I can’t stand any more!’ Another Bottersnike voice joined in: ‘Not me, Willigumble, not me! I ain’t done nothing!’ — and soon they were all at it: ‘Don’t hit me, Willigumble, please Willigumble, let me alone — cor! What a terror he is!’

  The Gumbles looked at each other in astonishment. Had Willi actually become a Supergumble, so soon?

  ‘This we have got to see,’ they cried. ‘Hey, Lyrebird’ — who just then arrived with worms — ‘look after Chip-Chip for a minute, will you? We must see what’s got into Willi.’

  Up the cliff they scrambled, scaling it like mountaineers first till they reached a higher ledge, then by making themselves a Gumblerope which lassoed the stump of a tree growing in a crevice; up the crevice, panting now, and over the last rise by spring-and-jump to the very top ... where groaning ’snikes sprawled on the rocks, flattened; in the middle one little rusty jam tin standing.

  ‘Willigumble?’ they whispered, awestruck by the damage done.

  The tin rattled slightly on the rock as Willigumble’s voice tried to get out — too squashed up though to sound a proper warning: ‘Careful! It’s a trap —’

  ‘Got you!’ the Bottersnikes shouted, and leaping fighting-fit from the rocks they grabbed the Gumbles and squashed them into jam tins.

  ‘I knew it’d work! I knew it’d work!’ Chank crowed. ‘The Gumbles are curious, see, they were bound to come; fishin’s no good, what you want is brains.’ Chank nearly burst with self-importance swaggering there on the cliff, and forty feet below him the lyrebird chick said ‘Chip!’ as his mother went for worms.

  THE PALACE-MOBILE

  ‘Now we’ve got the Gumbles back we can move on and find a better place to live,’ Chank said, shuddering at the splendid view from the cliff top.

  In front of him mile upon mile of hills stretched to the distant sea. Thousands and thousands of trees. There was no show of life apart from a crow in the sky. Chank shuddered at what he saw. Old stony ridges, lizard-runs, sun-dried and windworn. Deep gullies between, the invisible streams winding. And trees everywhere, patchy green, undisturbed. Clock time might never have begun among those thousands of silent trees.

  The cliff on which Chank stood had once been a lookout where people drove in with picnics and cameras. Since then the road had been changed and cars no longer came, bushes grew up thick and prickly beside the entrance, and someone had stolen the safety fence, so that you could walk over the edge if you wanted and fall into Lyrebird’s fernbed; and the only visitors to the lookout now were folk who found it a handy dump for their rubbish.

  The Bottersnikes were not in the least pleased with the view, which to their way of thinking let in too much cold wind. The rubbish was what they found attractive. Being too lazy to build homes of their own Bottersnikes choose to live in rubbish dumps. Here they laze and sleep, never moving far — especially in rainy weather, for Bottersnikes shrink when wet.

  ‘And the rubbish here is nothing fancy, nothing fancy at all,’ Chank grumbled. ‘I say we oughta move on to a better-class area.’

  But Bottersnikes seldom move unless they must. The King had found an oil dru
m with ends missing that suited him perfectly as a palace.

  Chank was not happy about the cliff either. ‘It is dangerous without a fence. Someone’s going to fall over. You’re supposed to be the boss,’ he said to the King. ‘What you going to do about it?’

  ‘Have a feed,’ the King said. ‘Send them Gumbles to get it ready.’

  Half the Gumbles were kept as hostages, half were taken from the tins and sent foraging. Fried mattress stuffing is what Bottersnikes like to eat, and pictures of food cut from magazines (tastier if coloured), and for sweets, bottle tops are favourites.

  The Gumbles in the foraging party, once they were out of sight, sat down in a hollow red gum to talk things over. Mountains of ’snikefood lay around them — mattresses, old papers, bottles; and they had to be careful of their feet as a bag of rusty nails had burst open there.

  ‘I’m worried about Chip-Chip,’ Tootngumble said.

  ‘I think Chank is right,’ said Merrigumble. ‘The Bottersnikes should move on. If they stay they will be fighting and falling over and will disturb the lyrebirds.’

  ‘And on the move there should be a chance to escape, all of us,’ Jolligumble put in eagerly. ‘You know how they crash about in the bush like hippopotamuses. Surely we could slip away and get back to the job of guarding Chip-Chip.’

  ‘But they will put us in jam tins,’ said Merrigumble. ‘They always do.’

  Tootngumble sighed. ‘I wish we had Tinkingumble here. His tinks are so bright.’ Tink was one of the hostages.

  ‘No one else feels like having a tink, I suppose?’

  ‘Sorry, I only toot. I know it’s not much use.’

  ‘Well, some are tinkers and some aren’t,’ Merrigumble said. ‘The thing is to do your best with what you’ve got, whether it’s a tink or a toot. So let’s hope the Bottersnikes move on, and that they don’t put us in tins, and that we can all escape —’

  ‘And that Fox hasn’t eaten Chip-Chip.’ It seemed rather a lot to hope for.