‘Well, it was a bit of a bump,’ said a familiar voice, a squeaky one. ‘They might have warned me.’
‘Willigumble! — is that you?’ they cried, astonished. ‘How did you get in there — and what have you done to yourself?’ For Willi had done his best to change himself into a bird. He had squeezed his nose into a sort of beak, stuck feathers round his middle and made flappers from his arms, something like a penguin’s. ‘I always wanted to be a lyrebird, didn’t I?’ Willie said a trifle sadly. ‘I can’t dance well enough to be a proper one but as a chick I’m good enough to fool Glag and Smiggles.’
‘Where’s the real Chip-Chip?’
‘In his nest, of course. When I heard Glag and Smiggles plotting I knew I had to do something so I pushed Chip-Chip to the back of the nest and covered him with feathers and when Smiggles put his hand in he grabbed me. He had his eyes shut anyway.’
‘Willi, you can’t stay there, it’s too dangerous.’
‘I must! As long as Fox thinks I’m Chip-Chip he won’t raid the nest again,’ Willi pointed out. He was right, of course. Fox had slunk away when the Bottersnikes became big and noisy but he would be back, nothing surer, as soon as he felt hungry.
‘Hang on for a bit then, Willi. We’ll get you out as soon as it’s safe.’ Toot and Jolligumble covered the cage carefully.
The Bottersnikes were becoming impatient for some progress towards a better world. ‘We can’t wait all day,’ they said, stamping, and the King announced: ‘I shall be ready for the grand opening of my Dump Development Scheme in five minutes.’
‘We can’t do everything at once!’ the Gumbles protested.
‘Yes you can! All you got to do is think faster.’
The Gumbles went into a huddle to decide what was to be done. Some of them felt a bit gloomy. If the Bottersnikes didn’t get what they wanted they would become crankier and crankier and nothing would be safe. Happigumble considered the best thing to do with difficult ’snikes was to give them a good feed and take their minds off other things. ‘I know, we’ll give them a banquet,’ he said.
‘But think of all the work!’
‘Glag and Smiggles are doing the hardest part for us,’ Happigumble remarked. ‘When they come back with a mattress we’ll stick it on the roof and barbecue it and there’s their banquet. We’ll have to build a big fire inside.’
It seemed a good solution, one that might stop the Bottersnikes damaging the scenery beyond repair. The Gumbles went to work, making Glag’s house large enough to be a banqueting hall, and strengthening the walls with logs, stones, anything they could find, to carry the weight of the mattress-roof. They had to hurry. They could tell from shouts and groans and the cracking of small trees that Glag and Smiggles were on the way home with something big and troublesome. When the two ’snikes appeared they were carrying a double mattress on their heads. Their red-hot ears had burned small holes in it already.
Glag and Smiggles were horrified to see what had happened while they were away: the Bottersnikes grown big, the King bawling and bossy again, Glag’s house altered out of all recognizable shape. The mattress they had struggled to bring home was taken from them and hoisted to the housetop, where it made a splendid roof. The house really looked something now, like the abode of a wild man in the woods. As they gathered wood for the barbecue fire the Gumbles felt it was almost a pity it had to be burned.
But burned it was. The Gumbles filled it with dry branches, twigs, leaves and bracken, then got a light from Chank’s ears — Chank was red hot because he would have liked to have invented the barbecue himself. The dry kindling flared, shooting tongues of flame to the roof, which quickly began to char and smoulder. The Bottersnikes hooed and hooted in the smoke. They saw now how it was going to work. When the mattress was cooked the Gumbles would rake the fire out so that the Bottersnikes could go in to the banquet. They could sleep off the effects of over-eating in the ashes, which would be nice and warm to lie in, and afterwards they could be left with an interesting piece of sculpture as part of the King’s Development Scheme. So it was really a centrally-heated sculptural barbecue-banqueting hall, and the King was quite pleased with the progress.
‘I shall open it as the first building in my Dump Development,’ he announced. ‘After the banquet.’
The Bottersnikes had never held a banquet before though they frequently threw Parties. These would go on for three days or longer getting rowdier and rowdier until there was nothing left to throw. The Gumbles hated them. A banquet, they hoped, would be more dignified. They were quite wrong.
The Bottersnikes couldn’t wait to begin. Before the banqueting hall was properly cool enough to enter they hopped in and tried to stamp out the embers with their horny feet. By jumping from the hot floor they could snatch handfuls of smouldering stuffing from the roof, but this was inconvenient and tended to give them the hiccups. They overcame this by sending half the Gumbles aloft with forked sticks. The Bottersnikes stood beneath with their mouths open and caught the hot stuffing as the Gumbles forked it down. A great success. ‘Now my Dump Development Scheme is working we’ll have banquets every day,’ the King said.
It was hot and dangerous work for the Gumbleforkers. The whole house rocked as the Bottersnikes pushed and shoved for their share of the banquet. It may have been this that gave Tink what he afterwards described as the brightest tink he’d ever had — luckily the Bottersnikes did not hear it over the chomping noises from their own teeth.
‘If we could only make the house fall down!’ Tink said.
The other forkers thought Tink was off his rocker again.
‘Don’t you see? They’re all standing in there stuffing themselves. If the place was to crash on top of them their banqueting hall would become —’
‘A prison!’ squeaked Tootngumble.
It would too. The bed would fall legs uppermost, pinning the Bottersnikes beneath, while the logs and stones used in the building would crash along the sides to stop them crawling from beneath.
‘We’d catch them all in one go and keep them there till Chip-Chip is grown up, then we’d only have Fox to worry about.’
Tootngumble climbed down the house to tell the others of this wonderful idea. Could it be made to work? Pulling the house down with a rope would be best, they decided; the plastic rope was still tied to Willi’s cage, which had been moved before the barbecue fire was lit. Happigumble threw up the free end of it to Tink, who tied it to the top of the iron bedstead. Only half the Gumbles could do the pulling, the others had to fork like mad to keep the Bottersnikes busy. They strained and tugged on the rope. The house rocked a little, nothing more. It was strongly built. After a second try the pullers realised Tink’s bright idea made too big a task for them.
‘We can’t do it without help,’ Happigumble said glumly.
Unexpectedly help came, though it did not seem so at first to the worried Gumbles. On the rocks above them there appeared — of all sights they least wished to see! — the sly form of Fox.
‘That’s all we need!’ the Gumbles groaned. ‘We can’t deal with Fox and Bottersnikes at the same time.’
Fox sat on the rocks and looked down curiously at the Banquetsnikes. They had eaten three-quarters of the mattress now and the King, who by standing on the others’ shoulders had had his full share, decided to call a break. For when having a Party the Bottersnikes liked to stuff themselves as full as they could possibly get, have a brief rest, then go on again. As his stomach was too full for the whistle to blow the King waved his arms and shouted ‘Half time!’, then, glaring round for anyone who might care to argue, his eye fell by chance on Fox.
‘Ha, Fox!’ he boomed. ‘Come and have —’ He nearly said a feed but changed his mind at the last moment. ‘— a look at my central eating barbecued sculpture-hall banquet. I just designed it and built it and now I’m going to open it as the first building in my Dump Development Scheme.’
‘I have come,’ Fox said, ‘for what is in that cage.’
A
nd then the Gumbles realised they had left the rescue of Willi perilously late. Toot and Merrigumble ran to the cage but the King was there before them, to make sure that what Fox wanted was nothing he wanted himself. Glag and Smiggles rushed out too, alarmed for their monster. The King laid hold of the cage and shook it violently.
‘Chip chip!’ cried Willi.
‘There is something in there,’ the King said intelligently, and ripped off the bag cover. There was Willi sitting in a small pool of feathers. Willi looked most odd — partly bird-shaped still, partly frightened Gumble, and the King did not know what to make of him at all. ‘What do you want that for, Fox?’
Fox came slowly to the cage and sniffed the feathers, which were genuine lyrebird. Willi shivered.
‘Hey! You can’t give the monster away. He’s ours,’ Glag blustered.
‘He’s mine! I caught him —’ Smiggles quailed under the King’s glowering eye, ‘— from the nest,’ he finished lamely.
The King looked at Willi’s beaky nose, his flapper-like arms, the strewn feathers. ‘From the nest?’ he said, and snuffled most unpleasantly. ‘Then this thing is a bird. A lyrebird! You can have him, Fox. You can bite his head off.’
‘No!’ yelled Glag. He grabbed Willi and tried to pull him between the bars. Willi stretched like chewing gum.
‘This is one lyrebird what won’t ever spoil a Gumbletrap!’ the King roared. ‘Bite him, Fox!’ He was holding the cage in both hands, pressing the wires apart for Fox to put his head in. But Fox hung back, knowing now that those interesting feathers did not belong to Willi, and the King lost all patience and rammed the cage over Fox’s head. At the same instant Glag pulled Willi out with a faint plop and dropped him. Toot and Merrigumble rolled him up like a fire hose and took him away for reshaping.
With the cage clamped round his neck, Fox went mad, wild. He thought he was in a trap. He pawed, his jaws snapped and frothed. The Bottersnikes found it the funniest sight they had seen. They waddled into the banqueting hall (where it was safer) and made windows to watch the fun. Finding the cage would not shake off, Fox began to run in short panicky rushes that sent the Bottersnikes into fits of snuffling. The house rocked each time Fox made one of his wild dashes, for the cage was still fastened to the housetop with the plastic rope. The Bottersnikes were enjoying themselves too much to notice this. ‘Fox lost his head — what a clown!’ they snuffled. ‘We oughta keep him as a entertainer.’ The funniest part of all, the part that really brought the house down, happened when Fox sat on his haunches and tugged with all his weight. A storm of snuffling went up from the Bottersnikes, the rope snapped — Fox and the cage were free — but the house was already falling.
The bed came down with a crash and a jangle that echoed into the trees. The Bottersnikes thought an earthquake had hit. ‘We’re buried alive!’ they wailed. ‘Help, Fox! Come and dig us out.’
But Fox would never come back, never, to a place where he had been trapped and laughed at. He shook free of the cage, and the flash of his red fur as he bounded across the rocks was the last they ever saw of him.
‘Fine sort of animal he turned out to be, leavin’ his mates buried in the rubble,’ the Bottersnikes howled.
The Bottersnikes were not buried alive; there was breathing room for all beneath the big bed though no space to move around. Tink’s tink had really come good this time. The Gumbles swiftly rebuilt the side walls made them quite secure, and put up a roof of palm fronds so that the prisoners would not shrink if it rained.
‘We shall have to come back in a week or two and let them out though,’ said Willi. He knew what it was like, being penned up.
But even this would not be necessary, they soon saw. For when the Bottersnikes had slimmed down a bit and worked off the effects of their huge banquet they would be able to crawl between the bars at the ends of the bed. In fact if they hadn’t eaten so much banquet they wouldn’t have been prisoners at all.
The Gumbles began to giggle. They were free. They piled all the jam tins they could find into a great pyramid and knocked it down with stones. Old Koala in his gum tree woke at the noise and couldn’t for the life of him make out what all the giggling was about. But Gumbles always giggle when they are happy.
Chip-Chip needed no more guarding after that. He grew big enough to leave his nest long before the Bottersnikes grew thin enough to escape from prison; he learned to run, to dig his own worms, to vanish in the fern at the approach of danger. Much later Chip-Chip grew his lyre tail and learned to dance by copying his father. He became great friends with Willigumble especially. He would dance for Willi almost any time except when he was moulting; and when he displayed his two-foot tail, shimmering and silvery and swaying, Willi always thought it was the loveliest thing he had seen.
HOT AND STRONG
Each day it seemed to become hotter.
In the bush the cicadas were out in thousands, filling the midsummer air with waves of dry screeching. The gum trees twisted their leaves edgeways to the sun so that they cast almost nothing of a shade.
The Gumbles, as they walked through the dry crackly litter beneath the trees, did not worry too much about the heat, but they did not like to see leaves dropping before their time, or the smaller plants dying of thirst in the parched ground. Least of all did they like the tang of distant smoke brought by the hot west wind.
‘Everywhere’s as dry as chips,’ Happigumble said. ‘I hope there’s rain on the way or we’re going to have bushfires.’
When they came to the stream called Earlyfruit Creek, one of their favourite haunts, the Gumbles found that the waterflow had shrunk to the merest trickle over the rocky bed, and that they now walked dry-footed where usually they loved to splash and paddle. Happigumble looked serious. When Earlyfruit Creek went dry, he pointed out, there would be no water at all in this part of the bush.
‘Then what will the wallabies drink?’ Willigumble said. ‘Where will the yabbies go, and the frogs and the waterboatmen?’
‘Perhaps we should build a dam while there is still some water coming down,’ Jolligumble suggested.
The Gumbles liked this idea. They would make a wall of earth and stones across the creek and hold back some of its last precious water for the animals to drink and the frogs to keep cool in — and for themselves to have a splash and paddle when no one else was using it. They chose a place under a clump of turpentines, which give the best shade of any of the bush trees. The plan was to place a log across the creek-bed to give strength to the wall, then cover it with earth dug from the banks. Pointed sticks would do for the digging and slings of bark to carry the soil; Gumbles have no trouble finding workmen’s tools in the bush. Despite the heat they set to work busily until Happigumble called out, ‘Hang on! We’ve forgotten something … Bottersnikes!’
‘What? Are they coming?’ the Gumbles cried in alarm.
‘No, but we must keep a lookout. It’s times like this when we’re busy on a job that we always get caught.’
This was most true. Bottersnikes, the fattest, laziest creatures living, like nothing better than to capture the Gumbles by sneaky tricks and traps, and these often have the best chance of success when the Gumbles are busy on a job. When caught the Gumbles become slaves. They are made to find food for their captors, build their rubbishy houses and do all the work Bottersnikes are too lazy to do for themselves. After work the Bottersnikes press them into tins from which, being squashy, the Gumbles cannot escape. They find it worse in summer, for the Bottersnikes want to be fanned for hours on end, and during their long and frequent sleeps they thoughtlessly leave the tinned Gumbles standing in the hot sun.
This time, to make sure they were not taken by surprise, they kept a sharp lookout, Happigumble on one bank and Merrigumble on the other. When a pair of bronzewing pigeons came down to share the shade, Merrigumble asked them if they would keep an eye open whilst flying around their territory and try and spot where the Bottersnikes were. ‘You can’t mistake them,’ he said. ‘When you see someth
ing so fat and ugly you can’t believe your eyes, that’s a Bottersnike.’
The pigeons weren’t flying more than they had to in that heat, but said they wouldn’t mind helping. ‘Soon there’ll be a beaut pool with a shallow end,’ Happigumble told them. ‘You can have a birdbath if you want.’
But when the dam was finished they saw it would take a long time to fill. The creek’s small trickle seemed to soak away almost as fast as it came in, as though the rocks themselves were thirsty. It was a bit disappointing for the dam builders, who would have liked a good splash and paddle after their hard work.
‘The dam is a great idea, and it will be lovely when it fills,’ Happigumble said, ‘though what we really want is a nice drop of rain.’ He peered through the treetops at the brazen sky. ‘Anyone feel like making a forecast?’ he asked doubtfully.
The Gumbles weren’t very clever about weather. They took each day as it came and made the best of it. The Bottersnikes on the other hand had their own forecaster — the Weathersnike, a very old and wrinkly ’snike who kept instruments and waddled around them daily. Most of the Gumbles thought his forecasts weren’t much good. What he chiefly went by was the corns on his feet — when they ached it meant rain. ‘And with feet like the Weathersnike’s you can’t tell which is corn and which kneebone,’ Merrigumble said. Still, he was an expert, what’s more he was sometimes right.
‘Hey,’ said Willi with a sudden idea, ‘when the pigeons tell us where the Bottersnikes are let’s creep up on them and try and listen in to one of the Weathersnike’s forecasts. He might know when it is going to rain.’
‘Grasshoppers! Certainly not,’ Happigumble exclaimed. ‘When we find out where the Bottersnikes are we’ll keep away from them, as far away as we can get.’
Happigumble was right, of course. Who wanted to run the risk of being caught and tinned during a heatwave? Willi didn’t argue about it. Privately though he still thought it would be a good lark to sneak up quietly and listen in to one of the Weathersnike’s forecasts.
The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles Page 7