The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles

by S A Wakefield

  ‘I’ll fire you up and you can tell them what we’ve done.’

  ‘No, you go, they might need your tinks up there.’

  It seemed strange that there were no pleased shouts from the top when the tiny ’snikes came flying home, and no sign either of the bombs that Happigumble’s party was supposed to collect. Tink agreed to go up and see what had been happening. Willi pulled on the catapult with his whole weight, which was just enough to give Tink the necessary boost. ‘Here I am!’ Tink yelled as he sailed over the edge of the cliff. ‘What’s everybody doing — O grasshop!’

  Tink struck Glag’s house as the rest had done, but lower down; Glag made him into a letterbox for his front door and felt that his house was perfect.

  The tiny Bottersnikes had been no use at all to Glag for building. Hard pellety things, they rattled off the house like hailstones. Wrinkling his nose, Glag pushed them into a heap with his foot and swept them under the carpet.

  Tink was miserable when he saw what his catapult had done. ‘I thought it was such a good idea,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not as bad as being in a jam tin,’ said Happigumble, who had been made into a hanging flowerpot. ‘And we don’t have to worry too much about Chip-Chip. Fox has gone away. We heard some crows talking about him. He’s heading for a farm where they keep poultry.’

  Tink brightened a little.

  ‘And the Bottersnikes are too small to do any harm — except Glag, and he thinks of nothing but his house.’

  ‘And Willi’s down there,’ Tink whispered. ‘He might be able to think of a way to help.’

  Willi was already doing this. By now he had realised something was very wrong at the top. ‘They must be in a jam up there; they’ll need me to get them out of it,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I’d better go and spy.’ Willigumble left the catapult and made his way towards the cliff, and there received quite a nasty shock. A Bottersnike, a full-sized Bottersnike, was lying in the fern asleep.

  ‘Smiggles!’ gasped Willi.

  Everyone had forgotten Smiggles. This was easy to do as a dreamer is a person of no importance when he is not dreaming. Smiggles had been lying at the bottom of the cliff ever since the rescue of the palace- mobile, unconscious at first, now sleeping peacefully.

  And it was not safe to leave him there — so close to the lyrebird’s nest. Willi pondered the problem anxiously. ‘Suppose he dreams a gun? I think I’d better throw stones at him till he wakes and — O grasshoppers!’ Willi cried, looking closer at the knobbly form in the fern, ‘it’s too late! He is dreaming!’

  THE ARTIST AND THE DREAMER

  The trouble with Smiggles was that his dreams became not true exactly, but solid, so that everyone could see what had been going on in his sleeping mind. Sometimes the things he dreamed were useful, just as often they were not; either way it made him different from the others and they seldom let him forget it.

  Whilst lying in the fern Smiggles dreamed that he was climbing easily up the cliff by ladder. Far below him the others shouted: ‘Help us, Smiggles! Tell us what to do!’ Smiggles waved to them and climbed on. Yet no matter how far he climbed he never reached the top.

  When he woke he saw that his dream ladder was still leaning against the cliff, firm and strong, no rungs missing, though too short by a few feet to reach the top. Smiggles was extremely annoyed with the cliff for being too big for his beautiful dream. With a few pounds of dynamite he could have made the cliff low enough to fit. Having none, he did the next best thing: he climbed to the topmost rung but one and yelled for help.

  Glag heard him and looked over the edge. He was not at all pleased to see the dreamer on his ladder. Glag enjoyed being the only full-sized Bottersnike, with a fine house to live in and all the Gumbles to himself; it was a very good arrangement. Between the legs of his bed he had raised a wall of kero tins, with big spaces for windows and blinds to keep out the view. The Gumbles were looped and twisted wherever a bit of decoration was needed. The only thing that worried Glag was that his house so far lacked a roof. If it rained he would have to move out and live in a bucket. What he needed to make his house quite perfect was a sound, weatherproof roof — that, and a large supply of food for his larder. Given these he saw no reason why he should not live the rest of his life in ease and elegance. Looking down at Smiggles a wonderful idea came to him for obtaining both.

  ‘Pull me up!’ yelled Smiggles.

  ‘All right,’ said Glag. ‘Hey, Smig, have a look in that nest before you come up.’

  ‘Not likely! There is a horrid monster in there.’

  ‘Then I won’t pull you up.’

  ‘Glag, come back!’ Smiggles wailed. ‘What do you want the monster for?’

  Glag snuffled. The idea he had in his head was good enough to make the world spin faster. ‘We’ll make a deal with Fox. We’ll catch the monster and put it in a cage, Smig, till we see Fox; then we’ll give him the monster to eat if he tells us where to find a mattress. I shall put the mattress on top of my house and it will be a wonderful roof to keep the rain out.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Smiggles said. ‘Mattresses are for eating.’

  ‘We’ll eat the corners when we’re hungry — it’ll last us for weeks. It’s only you and me, Smig, all the rest are small. And you can dream some paint and I’ll paint lots of pictures.’

  Smiggles thought about this. He very badly wanted to go up in the world and Glag was the only one who could help him. Once he was up there Smiggles reckoned he would soon find a chance to push the artist over the cliff, or perhaps brain him with his own easel.

  ‘Just you and me, Glag?’

  ‘And a mattress all to ourselves. And the Gumbles to look after us. And you can dream all day and I’ll paint pictures.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Smiggles hoarsely. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll catch the monster.’ He climbed slowly down the ladder trembling at the thought of what he had to do. It would not be so bad if he did not have to look at it. Smiggles closed his eyes, held his breath and put his hand carefully into the nest opening. The monster did not peck or bite. It felt quite soft and helpless. ‘Got you!’ Smiggles faltered. But he did not dare to look at it.

  At the top of the cliff Glag’s house rattled as the Gumbles strained to free themselves. But there was nothing they could do. Glag had fastened them with care; they were prisoners as surely as if they had been squashed into jam tins. Glag took no notice of the rattling, of their protests. He had tied an empty paint tin to the King’s fishing line and now lowered this to Smiggles.

  ‘Hurry up, Smig. Put the monster in the paint pot.’

  ‘Haul me up first,’ growled Smiggles, who was not going to be left behind by a trick.

  With a heave and a grunt, up came the dreamer. Together they hauled up the paint tin and its precious contents.

  ‘That ain’t much of a monster, Smig! Put it between two bits of bread and you wouldn’t have a sandwich.’

  Smiggles was enormously proud of himself now he had done the deed, and of his monster. ‘Not big, but savage! You should hear the noise it makes. Like that!’

  ‘Chip-chip!’ very piercing, came from the tin.

  The Gumbles’ sighs whispered like a sad wind all round the house. ‘Gumbles on guard we were supposed to be,’ they said miserably, ‘and here we are stuck on a pile of rubbish while Chip-Chip ends up in a paint pot.’

  ‘Willi’s still free,’ Tinkingumble remembered. ‘Perhaps he’ll think of something.’

  ‘But he’s so little, what can he do?’

  ‘He might — think of something,’ said Tink, trying to be cheerful.

  Glag was waiting for Smiggles to say something nice about his house. Smiggles said: ‘That is a rum sort of house. I thought it was a disaster in a coalmine.’

  ‘It’s more than a house, it’s a work of art — it’s a sculpture,’ Glag told him haughtily. ‘As it happens to be hollow you can live in it real comfortable. All it needs is a tasty roof, which we shall get when we see Fox.’ He pa
tted the tin and smirked.

  ‘My monster’s not safe in there, he might jump out the top. He ought to be in a proper cage.’

  ‘A cage!’ Glag was pleased with the idea. ‘It would look good in front of my house. And we can fatten the monster up.’

  They began at once, raking through the rubbish Glag had not used for his house. Nothing resembling a cage was to be found. Glag and Smiggles tramped the scrub with red ears. They pulled out stuff that had lain for years rusting and rotting quietly, and such disturbance did they make that two passing crows paused in their flight to see if anything interesting was being turned up. They perched in a nearby tree and cleared their throats.

  ‘There has been sport,’ said one. ‘Fox raided the poultry farm and took more than he needed.’

  ‘Then there will be meat on the bones he leaves!’

  ‘We shall soon see — he is coming back. With a fat hen in his mouth, he is heading this way.’ The two crows cawed and gurgled.

  ‘Grasshoppers! Did you hear that?’ cried Happigumble. ‘We’ve got to get Chip-Chip out of that tin, and quickly. Can’t someone think of something?’ Unfortunately, the Gumbles were as helpless as before. Being squashy — useful at times — means that when stuck you are stuck absolutely until deliverance comes.

  ‘Any chance of a tink?’

  ‘I’m trying,’ the letterbox replied. ‘It’s hard to be bright when you’re hollow inside.’

  ‘If only Willi would show up! He could help.’

  Having failed to find a cage, Glag and Smiggles decided to build one. They took a lot of care and fashioned a strong, cumbersome rattletrap of a cage from pieces of tin and wire. They forgot to build a door to it and had to press the wires apart to slip the monster in. To ensure the cage itself did not escape, or roll over the cliff, they tied it to the house with the plastic rope, part of which was still fastened to Smiggles’ tail. The monster was most secure. They covered the cage with a bag and snuffled.

  ‘He won’t get out of that!’

  ‘Not till he goes into Fox.’

  ‘Hurry up, Fox!’ they yelled into the bush.

  The Gumbles put on a bit of a bluster and tried to tell them that Fox wouldn’t be coming as he was taking up poultry for a living, but it did no good. ‘Them Gumbles ought to be in jam tins,’ Smiggles said, and started to pull them off.

  ‘Leave ’em alone!’ Glag screeched, sticking them on as fast as Smiggles pulled them off. ‘They are my decorations. Smiggles! Smiggles! This is my house and they’re my decorations.’

  ‘They’re half mine,’ Smig retorted. ‘I’ll have my half in jam tins.’

  Bit by bit the partnership of the artist and the dreamer turned to a furious shouting match, then to a full-scale battle with feet and fists and red-hot ears. The Gumbles watched hopefully. Some good should come from such a fierce battle, they felt. One of the fighters might cannon into the house, knock it down and shake some Gumbles free. Before this happened there was a sudden toot from Tootngumble and the others froze. Fox appeared, picking his way between the rocks above the lookout. He paused to watch the fight, one paw raised. Smiggles was grinding his heel into Glag’s tail; Glag had Smiggles in a headlock and was punching his face with his free hand, until he too saw Fox.

  ‘Fox!’ Glag shouted, landing a last vicious punch. ‘Me and him is business partners. We got a deal to discuss with you.’

  ‘I mind my own business,’ said Fox. He continued his dainty-footed walk to the edge of the cliff and glanced down to the nest.

  ‘It’s no good looking down there,’ Glag told him. ‘We’ve captured the monster —’

  ‘I captured the monster. You can have him to eat, Fox —’

  ‘If you show us where to find a mattress.’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Fox said. ‘I have eaten fowl.’

  ‘But you’ll be hungry tomorrow —’

  ‘Or in ten minutes’ time,’ Smiggles added. ‘And the monster is in a cage, fattening, so you can keep him as long as you like.’

  Fox seemed interested. ‘Really? Show me.’

  ‘You show us the mattress first,’ they said, businesslike.

  Fox was a craftier schemer than Glag or Smiggles. He decided to get the two ’snikes well out of the way while he took a look around; pretending to search his memory he said: ‘Let’s see, the best mattress I know is round the back of —. No, that’s not the best; people like you will want nothing but the best, and that you will find a little way down the road, under a tree with branches.’

  ‘We’ll find it!’ They nudged each other and snuffled as they went off to look. ‘He knows more than one! We’ll find fault with the first and make him show us the second before we give him the monster.’

  Alone now at the lookout, Fox stared again towards the nest, then at Glag’s extraordinary house. Was it a trap? He padded warily around it, keeping a safe distance. He paused under the cage. His nose seemed to quiver.

  Silently, the Gumbles screamed: ‘Don’t move, Chip-Chip! Don’t make a sound!’

  Fox reached upwards and with a front paw touched the cage gingerly, making it swing. There was a little rustling noise inside, and a feather floated to the ground.

  DUMP DEVELOPMENT SCHEME

  Fox sat back on his haunches and eyed the cage greedily. With one spring, he reckoned, he could strike the cage from its hook. He coiled himself.

  ‘Something’s burning!’ cried Jolligumble suddenly.

  ‘The house!’ Merrigumble shouted. ‘It’s on fire!’

  It was no hoax, either, to put Fox off: smoke was rising, choking grey smoke, from somewhere inside. Fox backed away and sat down at a distance. He wasn’t hungry enough to risk getting burned for a mouthful of dinner. But the Gumble-decorations were helpless, pinned to the burning house, as was Chip-Chip in his cage.

  Luckily it was not a serious blaze. An old bag, which was Glag’s carpet, had started smouldering from the heat of the Bottersnikes’ ears as they lay beneath it, where Glag had swept them. They crawled out, tiny, damp and shivery, blew on the bag to make it glow and fed it with paper and small sticks until they had a warming blaze. As Glag had not built a chimney smoke poured from the door and windows, making the fire look worse than it really was.

  Usually when shrunk, Bottersnikes must wait for the wind to dry them before returning to normal size, which may take half a day or longer. With a nice fire going they dried out rapidly and grew about two inches a minute, all their warts and knobbles coming back, their grating voices, the toadstools on their eyebrows; and a certain idea that was in the King’s head swelled and swelled as the space in his skull increased.

  That lyrebird, the King had been thinking. Who was it that spoiled the well-planned Gumbletrap? Who caused the Bottersnikes to fall in the creek? Who snored at the King’s funeral?

  Lyrebird.

  ‘That bird must be got rid of,’ the King squeaked. He was about the size of a rat with a voice to match. ‘All lyrebirds must be got rid of so’s it never happens again.’

  ‘Down with them long-tailed birds!’ the Bottersnikes chorused.

  ‘And them with short tails,’ the King said, growing an inch, ‘and them with curved beaks and gaudy feathers! What’s the good of birds? They only flit around and wake you at dawn with their twitterin’.’

  Birds made dawn hideous with their twittering, the growing ’snikes agreed.

  ‘Do away with ’em! Animals too,’ the King said, being then as big as a bandicoot. ‘Snakes! Lizards! What good do they do? They only take up room and breathe the air.’

  ‘Taking up our space!’ screeched the Bottersnikes, who now filled the floor of Glag’s house around the fire and, still growing, had nowhere to go but upwards. ‘Breathing our air! We are the only things that matter — naturally.’

  Pressed upwards in the throng, the King put one foot on Glob’s head, the other on Chank’s shoulder, and was tall enough to look out of the window. ‘All that land,’ he said, shaking his fist at the view, ‘is o
nly fit for kangaroos and crows.’

  ‘And who wants to be a kangaroo?’ the Bottersnikes said indignantly. ‘Or a crow?’

  ‘We’ll clear it. We’ll chop it down and burn it. We’ll make it nice and level so’s we can waddle where we like, and sleep where we like. And there won’t be no animals making a nuisance nor no birds to wake us.’

  ‘They’ll all be dead,’ the Bottersnikes shouted. ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo!’

  ‘Instead of all them trees we’ll fill it up with rubbish,’ the King went on, he and his idea nearly full-sized now. ‘Avenues and avenues of rubbish! Beautifully arranged into palaces for elegant livin’! Fountains that don’t work! Sculptures —’

  ‘We’ll feel at home wherever we go!’ the Bottersnikes crowed delightedly. ‘Livin’ will be pure pleasure!’

  So great was the crush in Glag’s house, the surging excitement as they grew, that the King was squeezed from the window and fell heavily. ‘This place is too small,’ he stormed, kicking it. ‘We want room to expand. We want space. What we want,’ the King said, full-sized at last, ‘is a Dump Development Scheme. To make a World Fit for Bottersnikes.’

  This put the Bottersnikes in a frenzy. They came pouring from Glag’s house into the open, then paused, blinking angrily at the unimproved world they saw and ready to kick things. ‘We want Development!’ they chanted. ‘We want a Better World!’ Finding the Gumbles hanging about the house doing nothing the Bottersnikes pulled them off and shouted: ‘You heard what we want! Well, get busy on some development.’

  The Gumbles were delighted to be released, though there was no chance of escape with the Bottersnikes so worked up — besides Chip-Chip had to be rescued somehow and returned to his nest. With the Bottersnikes in their present mood Chip-Chip was in dreadful danger. Glag’s house was being bashed and kicked because it was so far from perfect, and after a loud protest from Glob and Snorg the covered cage slipped from its hook and fell. Toot and Jolligumble ran to it, dragged it inside the house to save it being trampled. ‘Chip-Chip, are you all right?’