The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles

by S A Wakefield

  ‘The weather,’ said the Weathersnike, ‘is going to be dry.’

  None of the Bottersnikes took much notice. It was dry already and had been for several weeks, and it is perfectly easy to forecast dry weather in the middle of a drought.

  ‘And hot,’ the Weathersnike added.

  Still they took no notice. They were snoozing comfortably in the warm dust of a bush track and it was much too early to be worrying about the weather. At half-past eight in the morning the Bottersnikes’ day would not begin, properly speaking, for at least two hours.

  The Weathersnike was rather cut up that no one paid attention. ‘One of these fine days the drought will end,’ he said snarkily. ‘Then you will need my forecasts! You can’t take chances with the weather.’ He fanned himself by opening and closing his umbrella rapidly. The Weathersnike never ventured under any sky, blue, white, pink, orange or grey, without his umbrella.

  The other Bottersnikes, twenty or so without umbrellas, liked the weather to be dry and warm. Rain is what Bottersnikes detest most, for they shrink when wet; even a heavy dew can be quite annoying, since if they shrink their feet in dewy grass they become top heavy and fall over from their own weight. But there had been no fogs, dews or rain lately, and the Bottersnikes assumed this holiday weather would go on and on since it suited them perfectly. ‘Go away, Weathersnike,’ some of them growled. ‘Don’t you go mucking about with the weather! It’s all right as it is.’

  Presently however, as the day became a scorcher with the sun high and the wind puffing from the ovens of the northwest, the Bottersnikes began to feel that the fine weather was going too far. The layers of fat beneath their horny skins were starting to bubble and simmer in the heat — some of them found they were already as brown as sausages. They sat up grumpily, rubbed their eyes and looked for some shade. Around them lay rocks and low scrub, good lizard country, little else — if they wanted proper shade, they saw, they would have to waddle through the furnace at noon and find some trees. So they shut their eyes again, fell back moaning and blamed the Weathersnike. Their ears became red hot with anger, which made the heat worse.

  The King of the Bottersnikes woke up, sizzling rather loudly.

  ‘We will move,’ the King announced, ‘to where it is cooler.’

  Instantly the Bottersnikes fell asleep, or pretended, to show they had not heard. Whenever the band moved three or four of them were obliged to carry the King, and this itself made a good reason for staying put as the King was as heavy as plutonium with a temper to match.

  The King observed some pieces of rotting paling fence lying in the scatter of rubbish along the roadside.

  ‘This fence wood,’ he shouted, battering his band soundly with some of the pieces, ‘will make a good carrying chair for me, so wake up and get moving.’ He sat himself on half a dozen palings that were still joined together. Four Bottersnikes were to pick up this platform by the corners and bear it on their shoulders. ‘Smiggles, Glag, Amps and Mudger,’ the King ordered. ‘You will volunteer to carry my chair.’ When it seemed likely that the King’s weight would break the boards he called on two more volunteers to support him in the middle. ‘Glob and Snorg’, he directed. These two had the worst job. Their heads and shoulders took the pounding as the platform bumped and lurched down the road.

  ‘It ain’t right we should be treated like this,’ Glob growled. ‘In the heat.’

  ‘What we want is a lighter King,’ Snorg panted.

  ‘A new King. Someone who’ll treat us proper.’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for. To be looked after by the King and treated proper,’ Snorg said indignantly. He and his cobber Glob prided themselves on never taking their turn at any sort of work whatever, and it pained them very much that they had been caught as chair bearers.

  The King became irritated by the muttering below, though he couldn’t hear what was being said. ‘Them two ’snikes down there is strolling comfortably in the shade while up here I am being scorched in the sun,’ he complained. ‘Chank! Gubbo! Hold that shade canopy over me.’

  A large notice from the rubbish, painted on a sheet of tin, was what took the King’s fancy as a canopy. Arched over him and held on either side by Chank and Gubbo, it served quite well and allowed the King to move through the fierce heat with the comfort of a maharajah riding an elephant. To pass time during the journey he lay back and read the lettering on the underside of his canopy: CUSTOMER PARKING ONLY, it said, which the King found rather amusing.

  ‘Faster!’ he shouted when he had finished reading. ‘At this rate we shan’t arrive before winter.’

  Glob had had more than enough of the heat, the dust and the pounding. ‘We will do him in,’ he hissed to Snorg. ‘We’ll get rid of him! Then one of us can be King. Don’t tell Chank’ — who was their rival in most things and would certainly want to be King himself.

  ‘You can be King,’ said Snorg. He was the laziest ’snike of the band, always too tired to be ambitious. He hoped that getting rid of the King would not mean too much work.

  ‘We’ll shove him over a cliff,’ Glob said. ‘We’ll roll a boulder on him.’

  ‘We could put him under a rotten tree,’ Snorg yawned, ‘and wait for the wind to blow it down.’

  Long before they reached any trees of a decent size, Gubbo collapsed from heat exhaustion. The canopy whanged on to the front pair of carriers, causing them to drop the platform and fall flat on their faces. The King slid forward very majestically and the rear carriers, seeing the other two had stopped work, dropped their end and sat down. Glob and Snorg found themselves at the bottom of the whole unfortunate pile-up.

  The King was not as violently angry as might have been expected. Near the scene of the accident there chanced to be a single scribbly gum whose tuft of foliage cast a shade exactly big enough for the King and his importance, with no room for anyone else. Taking his sun canopy, which had been badly bent in the spill so that it now read KING ONLY, the King placed it against the tree trunk and took possession of the patch of shade.

  ‘Now it is cooler,’ he announced, ‘we will have a feed.’

  Though the Bottersnikes were nearly dead in the heat they felt it would be even worse to die of hunger as well, so they poked wearily in the rubbish looking for scraps of ’snikefood. Around them, on the stunted roadside bushes, hung the fruit of geebungs shrivelling and yellowing in the heat, and wattle seeds about to burst from their pods.

  To Glob and Snorg, who like all ’snikes, hated the bush and everything that grew in it, it seemed that these seeds and fruits not only looked nasty but would be highly poisonous to anyone who ate them; this gave Glob a brilliant idea which he hissed to Snorg behind the palm of his hand.

  ‘Hey! We’ll poison the King! Easier than pushing him over a cliff.’

  Snorg thought, ‘It is sure to work! Stuff like that would poison anybody.’

  Using the tips of their fingers only, Glob and Snorg gathered some geebung fruit and carefully extracted wattle seeds from their pods. These they crushed and mashed into a revolting sort of jam, then spread some of it on a pizza tray to make it look tasty. Glob arranged the poisoning with his usual cunning. Standing where the King could see, he pretended to eat the pizza himself, with relish.

  ‘Give me that!’ the King ordered. He wrenched it from Glob’s grasp and ate it, tray and all, without bothering to spit out the geebung stones.

  Glob and Snorg expected to see him drop dead on the instant, but the King never looked fitter in his life and shouted, ‘More! And get some flavour into the cooking.’

  ‘We shall have to make it stronger,’ said Snorg, very vexed. Glob, out of sheer temper, yanked up a harmless bush which astonished him by having snaky yellow roots much longer than its branches. Roots must be extremely dangerous, Glob thought, since they would suck up all the poisons in the dirty earth, so he hacked them to pieces with the edge of a stone and added them to the geebung jam. For good measure Snorg pulled some spiny leaves from a grasstree, cut off th
e white parts of the stems and stirred them into the death-mix. They wrapped the whole concoction in newspaper and gave it to the King.

  ‘We’ve got him this time,’ Snorg hissed. ‘That stuff would poison a dinosaur.’

  The King devoured the whole package, only spitting out those parts of the paper where the news did not appeal to him. ‘I’m tired of this tasteless tucker!’ he roared. ‘Find me something I can get my teeth into!’

  After that Glob and Snorg gave up. The day was too hot for them. The King was too strong.

  Chank and Gubbo were angry with the King too, though had not thought of anything so bold as poisoning him. ‘The King is an idiot,’ Chank said. ‘Why should we slave in the heat? The King should catch the Gumbles and make them work for us. But as the King is no good for anything except feeding his face I shall catch the Gumbles myself!’

  ‘Bewdy!’ said Gubbo. ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘With a Gumbletrap. You leave the brainwork to me, Gubbo, ’cos what you got for brain ain’t worth mentioning.’

  Gubbo was considered stupid by the Bottersnikes, so plain silly he wasn’t even an ornament. They would have nothing to do with him. Chank did not mind having him around. His simplicity made Chank’s brainwork seem flashy by comparison.

  ‘Now you find the Gumbles, Gubbo, and I’ll think of a trap to catch ’em, and we’ll keep ’em to ourselves. We won’t tell the King.’

  Gubbo was all right now. His collapse with the canopy might have been only a well-timed attack of stupidity. He looked at the miles of scrubland behind them, the denser bush below, the rocky ridge above; a bruiser of a landscape, baked and big, in which the Gumbles might be anywhere.

  ‘Finding ’em would be easier,’ Gubbo thought, ‘if I could fly.’

  He flapped his arms hopefully, and found he couldn’t. ‘But there’s birds,’ he went on. ‘Things with wings! So why don’t I ask them?’ A moment later Chank heard him shouting in a manner peculiar even for Gubbo. ‘Hey, you dicky-bird-fella! We Botterfeller long time no Gumbles! Which way dem Gumblefeller go?’

  ‘What are you blabbing to them parrots for?’ Chank said irritably.

  ‘They ain’t parrots, they’re pigeons. Naturally I is talking in pidgin talk.’

  The bronzewing pigeons took no notice, either of Gubbo’s pidgin or Chank’s bawling, except to fly away when the red-eared Bottersnikers came too close.

  ‘Idiot birds! They are as bad as you, Gubbo,’ Chank growled. But he was not slow to take over Gubbo’s idea and use it as his own. ‘Brains tells me what’s got to be done! We’ll make a birdtrap, Gubbo, and catch some birds, and make them tell us where the Gumbles are; then we’ll make a Gumbletrap and catch the Gumbles —’

  ‘And make them tell us where the birds went!’ cried Gubbo. ‘That’s neat.’

  So it happened that while Glob and Snorg were concocting poisons to kill the King, Chank and Gubbo were hunting for materials to make a birdtrap. Gubbo found a nearly full packet of birdseed, mouldy and infested with weevils, otherwise in excellent condition. Chank discovered a sieve and a long piece of string, and from these bits and pieces he quickly constructed a birdtrap of the classic kind.

  It might have worked too, with a sprinkling of birdseed as bait, except that the King went and spoiled the whole plan. The patch of KING ONLY shadow had shifted with the sun and was no longer covering him. The King became annoyed at this and threatened to have the tree chopped down. ‘We will move,’ he announced for the second time, ‘to where it is cooler. To where the shade don’t flit about. We will move to them trees down there.’

  With a commanding gesture of his arm, the King of the Bottersnikes pointed to the turpentine trees beneath which the Gumbles had built their dam.

  TINKINGUMBLE AND THE DRY WATER

  The Gumbles’ way of brightening up unpleasant work is to chatter and sing while they are doing it. This gets the job done in half the time, or seems to, but means they are paying no attention to anything else. With their diggers and scrapers they had made a hole nearly large enough to bury the tins, which was pretty good going in bone-dry ground on a hot day, and they were quite unaware that Chank and Gubbo were only a few yards away, peering and gloating at them through the roadside bushes. Chank’s hands were still round Gubbo’s throat to stop him squealing with excitement.

  Then Chank burst into the midst of the digging party.

  ‘Don’t anybody move! You are all my prisoners.’

  Gubbo leapt in too, tripped and fell sprawling. The Gumbles were bowled over with astonishment. As a surprise raid it couldn’t have been more successful.

  Chank moved fast, he grabbed the nearest Gumble. It happened to be Willie. ‘If anyone tries to escape I’ll bite this one’s ears off.’ Chank gnashed his teeth over Willi’s head.

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair,’ some of the Gumbles cried. They had never known the Bottersnikes quite as vicious as this.

  ‘I’ll decide what’s fair and what ain’t! I’m the new King. There’s going to be changes round here.’

  ‘I’m the new Number Two King,’ Gubbo added. ‘Because it was my birdseed.’

  The Gumbles couldn’t make much sense of this, not knowing about the poisoning of the King; but it was plain to them that they were in one of the worst jams ever — caught quite off guard, Chank cocky and vicious and calling himself King, a mountain of tins ready for them to be squashed into and weather hot enough to bake them. And nothing they could do about it.

  ‘Start putting the Gumbles in them tins, Gubbo,’ Chank directed. ‘Squash ’em in hard.’

  Sometimes in spots like this Tinkingumble was at his best. Tink was the ideas Gumble; when he was in form a stream of notions would come from his head, some good, some not so good, but each one ripe and sweet making a clear tink! as it came into being, and at the time it always seemed to him the best idea he had ever had. This happened now, tink! like a bellbird, and he said quickly, ‘Don’t splash! You’ll waste it.’

  ‘Splash what?’ snapped Chank.

  ‘The dry water.’ Tinkingumble pointed to the hole they had dug in the powdery soil. ‘See? That’s about the driest water you’re ever likely to find.’

  ‘Dry water!’ scoffed Chank.

  ‘Why not? Everything else has gone dry! The ground’s dry, the bush is dry, the wind’s dry, the creek is going dry — why should you suppose the water’s not going dry too? Mind you,’ Tink added, ‘some bits of water go drier than others. This is the driest we’ve ever seen. Wouldn’t you say?’

  The other Gumbles agreed they’d never seen water less wet than this lot, never. Tink stirred it lovingly, like a chef with a special broth, and held up the stick. ‘See? No drips! Bone-dry water. It’s so unusual we thought it worth saving.’

  ‘What good does it do?’ Chank said suspiciously.

  ‘A smart ’snike like you ought to be able to see that. For one thing you could have a bath without getting wet.’

  ‘You could cool off on a day like this without shrinking,’ Happigumble suggested. ‘A clever King could think of all sorts of things to do with it. But if you’re not interested we’ll fill the hole in, then it will all be wasted.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Chank began to see that a pool of dry water might be a useful possession for a new King. He needed something to impress the band, especially Glob and Snorg. He wasn’t going to be fooled, though. There would have to be some tests. He shoved Willigumble in the hole and prodded him to see how far he would sink.

  ‘That’s another thing about dry water — you can’t drown in it,’ Tink remarked. ‘If we could find enough of it you might even learn to swim.’ The Gumbles had to keep very straight faces, to stop themselves sniggering at the thought of Bottersnikes taking their dry swimming lessons.

  ‘You guarantee it won’t shrink?’ Chank said. He told Willi to get out and went to test it with a cautious toe, then changed his mind. ‘Gubbo!’ he commanded, with all the authority of a new King.

  ‘Who, me?’ sai
d Gubbo.

  ‘Get in that pool of dry water and show me if you shrink. Don’t waste it by splashing about.’

  Gubbo looked at the hole and reckoned there wasn’t anything in it.

  ‘Nobody cares what you think, you ain’t tooled up for thinking,’ Chank told him. ‘You just do as you’re told and leave the brainwork to me.’ Tink explained that the hole looked empty because the dry water was so clean and pure. ‘You never get fish and tadpoles and things in it and it never goes green.’

  Gubbo lowered himself gingerly into the hole, where the Gumbles fanned him and sponged him with dusty water. True, he did not shrink — became larger, if anything, by a thickish coating of dust.

  ‘Is it cool?’ Chank wanted to know.

  Gubbo sneezed and said, ‘It ain’t bad.’

  ‘Right,’ said the new King. ‘We’ll save it.’

  ‘It’ll have to be scooped out of the ground pretty soon or it will soak away,’ Tink said. ‘Lucky we’ve got all these tins here! They’ll just about hold all the dry water and keep it clean till you want to use it.’ This, he felt, was the best part of his tink. The Gumbles themselves could not be squashed into the tins if those tins were already full of dry water. Without waiting to be ordered the Gumbles dipped each tin into the hole, scooped out the precious contents and set the tins in a row on the edge of the track, telling Gubbo to mind and not kick them over.

  ‘I ain’t that stupid,’ Gubbo said angrily.

  So far the dry-water tink had gone extremely well; it had saved them from the risk of being tinned and baked in the sun. Now things began to get more difficult. Glob appeared. He sneaked up quietly, mainly to see what Chank was up to. A long way behind Snorg was sneaking up too, to see what Glob was up to. Several of the others, feeling hungry, were slowly waddling back to the road in the slightly cooler evening because there was no ’snikefood at the creek. The Gumbles found themselves surrounded by more and more hot and grumpy Bottersnikes. Each lot, as they came up, wanted to grab the Gumbles and squash them into the tins.