‘I’ll go first,’ Tootngumble said. He had the knack of tooting at the first sign of danger. No one knew how or why — it was just something that happened, like Tink’s tinks. The rest followed him warily, between the sprawling clumps of blackberries and bracken. All their caution seemed to be unnecessary. The old paddock was quite deserted. There weren’t even any cattle; the only grazing had been done by wallabies and rabbits.
Near the barn, a fairly large dam was full of brownish, swirling floodwater. Tumbledown Creek raced through the paddock, into the dam, then out and on into the Dark Forest.
‘Just what we’ve been looking for!’ Willigumble shouted. ‘A place where we can canoe! In the dam, where the water’s calmer.’
Happigumble still didn’t like the idea. ‘What if our boats got swept out of the dam and down to the forest? We’d be wrecked for sure. I wish Willi had never thought of this canoeing,’ he sighed.
Quite a loud tink! came from Tinkingumble, who had climbed partly up the wall of the barn and was looking into a tank put there to catch water from the roof. ‘Idea!’ Tink said unnecessarily. ‘There’s some nice calm water in the tank, not too deep. . .’
‘That’s no good for canoeing,’ Willi said.
‘No, but we could slide into it, through that pipe from the roof. Like a slippery dip, see? Come down wheee! splosh!’
Gumbles love any game with a wheee! in it, more so if there is a splosh! at the end. Getting to the roof to begin the slide was a bit of a job, but Fixngumble worked out a way to make it easier. He laid a wooden plank across the top of the tank, which was an open one, and from this a ladder of six Gumbles could reach the roof. They lined up in the guttering, then quickly, one after the other, jumped into the downpipe — head first, feet first, it didn’t matter — and slid shrieking wheee! down the slippery pipe to end with a delicious splosh! in the shallow water. The first to slide were ducked and dunked by those coming after, until the bottom of the tank was a floundering, churning mass of Gumbles. They called the game Gumbleducks, and voted it one of the best they had ever played.
‘As good as canoeing and much safer,’ Happigumble said. ‘And it will keep Willigumble happy.’
The tank leaked rather badly. After each shower it held water long enough for about ten minutes of Gumbleducks, then it became too shallow and they had to wait for the next shower to come along. The hardest part of the game was making the Gumble-ladders to climb back first to the plank then the roof, then hauling the ladders up when they’d been used. Fixngumble thought of the answer to this one too: ‘Let’s go back to the Dark Forest and get the ladder we made to rescue the possum. It will make it easier to climb up to the roof.’
‘Good idea!’ the Gumbles agreed. ‘We’ll be able to have a lot more Gumbleducks while the water lasts. Let’s go and get the ladder.’
At the top of the ladder Smiggles was trembling a bit, being scared of the height and of the shouts of the angry band below, but he was still able to show some true ’snike cunning. He closed his eyes, gave a few loud snores, then pretended to wake with a jerk.
‘I done it!’ he shouted. ‘I dreamed a roof.’
‘Where? Where?’ the Bottersnikes yelled.
‘Over there.’ Smiggles pointed to the barn.
‘Idiot! Why couldn’t you have dreamed it this side of the creek?’
Smiggles clambered down the ladder and set off for the barn as fast as he could waddle. With rain spotting about them, the rest of the band saw they had no choice but to cross the broken bridge as best as they could and follow the dreamer. The Weathersnike made the most fuss about it. He had all the forecasting gear to carry, and his rope, and his umbrellas which he never shared with anyone; all this burden of belongings had to be carried somehow over the Tumbledown flood.
‘Help me with my instruments,’ the Weathersnike shouted.
But the Bottersnikes were only interested in helping themselves.
‘Help him?’ they shouted. ‘Why should we?’ They blamed the forecaster entirely for the rain that threatened.
‘He brings bad weather wherever we go,’ Snorg snarled.
‘He makes it rain then won’t lend his umbrellas,’ Glob grumbled.
‘We’d all be better off if he dropped in the creek, him and his instruments too.’
‘And he’s never caught a Gumble in his life.’
‘That’s right!’ the band said indignantly. ‘Who needs a bad-weather forecaster what’s never caught a Gumble in his life?’
So they left the Weathersnike to help himself and, clinging to each other’s tails, edged their way over the slippery wood of the broken bridge. They hurried to the fence and puffed and wheezed their way through the paddock, almost as fast as ’snikes have ever been known to waddle. They reached the barn just as the fresh shower began to pour. They bashed and tugged at the barn’s heavy doors, forced their way in and flopped exhausted on the floor as the rain came smashing on the roof.
The Gumbles cheered as the rain poured down again, and hurried on to fetch the ladder. ‘Lovely weather for Gumbleducks!’ Willi shouted.
They were squelching along the bank of Tumbledown Creek as it raced out of the paddock, and were separated by several clumps of blackberries from the Bottersnikes as they hurried in. Frogs and crickets in the soaked paddock set up a creaking and crackling so loud that the Bottersnikes couldn’t hear the chatter of the Gumbles, and the Gumbles couldn’t hear the pants and wheezes of the ’snikes as they hastened to the barn.
The ladder was still leaning against the tree where the Gumbles had left it after their rescue of the possum. Of course they had no idea that Smiggles had used it too. If they had looked more carefully they might have seen some ’snikeprints on the wet ground, before the rain washed them out, and the scratchmarks where wiry ’sniketails had been dragged through damp sand patches. But they were in too much of a hurry to get back to Gumbleducks.
‘Isn’t it great not having to worry about ’snikes?’ Jolligumble said, with rain streaming down his face.
‘Poor little pets! They’ve probably all shrunk to three inches high by now,’ Merrigumble giggled. ‘Wherever they are.’
But the Weathersnike, large as life, was skulking behind the trunk of the ironbark tree. He had both his umbrellas up against the rain and the rest of his gear he had tied to himself with the rope.
After the Gumbles had gone with the ladder the Weathersnike very cautiously crossed the broken bridge and waddled through the last part of the Dark Forest, keeping himself well covered by his umbrellas. When he came to the paddock and saw that he would have to cross wet grass, he rummaged in his gear and found two plastic bags which he tied over his feet to keep them dry. He climbed carefully through the wires. From the bracken growing along the fenceline he picked several fronds and stuck them on the point of his umbrella, for camouflage.
He waddled on through the paddock, very slowly. With all his gear tied on he looked like an ancient pile of rubbish growing weeds. He gave the dam a wide berth and approached the barn from the side where the tank was.
Gumbleducks was in full swing again, or full splosh. The ladder made the game much easier to play, and the Gumbles were having the time of their lives. They didn’t notice that after each wheee! splosh! a peculiar rubbishy patch of bracken had moved a little closer to the tank, until at last it seemed to be growing right by the tankstand itself.
‘Water’s getting low,’ Merrigumble remarked. ‘We need more rain.’
‘One or two more Gumbleducks,’ Willi shouted. ‘Come on.’
As they laddered themselves back to the roof, the Weathersnike swiftly folded an umbrella, the one whose point was sharpened like a dagger, and began jabbing holes in the rusty iron of the tank, all round the bottom. He skipped about quite nimbly for a ’snike, dodging the little spurts of water that came out.
The ’snikes inside the barn had realised at last what was causing the bangs and scamperings on the roof, which had stopped them from going to sleep. The
y had worked out too what wheee! splosh! meant. Normally such noises would not have caused tired ’snikes any loss of sleep at all, but being in a new place — or rather, a very old one — they had been worried that it might be haunted.
‘That ain’t ghosts up there,’ Chank declared. ‘That’s Gumbles.’
‘Enjoying themselves!’ the Bottersnikes said indignantly. ‘They got no right.’
Though the rain had stopped, the Bottersnikes saw the grass was still too wet for them to go Gumble-hunting, so they stood in the doorway and stamped and raved. ‘Come down and give yourselves up,’ the King bellowed.
‘Bats’ blood!’ Happigumble cried. ‘How did those ’snikes get in there? Out of here, quick!’ He made a move for the ladder.
‘No. Quicker by the Gumbleduck pipe,’ Fix said. ‘There should be just enough water left.’
But there wasn’t.
The first few Gumbles to slide hit the bottom of the tank hard and stingy, and flattened out. The rest came rapidly after, plop-plop-plop, and stuck to each other like pikelets on a plate.
‘Where’d the water go?’ the Gumbles said dazedly. It was like being squashed in a giant jam tin.
The Weathersnike poked his head over the top of the tank. His ears were glowing brightly beneath his umbrella, but when he saw all the Gumbles pancaked in the tank he snuffled his nose nastily, which meant that he was laughing. As a forecaster of the weather he seldom found much to laugh about. And until now he had never caught a Gumble in his life.
THE QWERTYUIOP
The Bottersnikes had realised by now that the barn wasn’t a Smiggles dream, and wasn’t likely to disappear. They were quite pleased with it. It was old, and very strongly built. The walls were slabs of thick timber with the cracks plastered with clay. The roof had only one leak in it, and the Weathersnike placed his rain gauge so as to catch the drip. Dust lay thick, spiderwebs festooned the walls, and there was enough junk to make the Bottersnikes feel thoroughly at home — rusty tools, wire, bags and farm junk mostly, and a tractor that wouldn’t go.
One corner had been cleaned out and some household stuff put there: heavy old furniture, some boxes of clothes and books, an ancient typewriter and other things that didn’t interest the Bottersnikes much but put a gleam in Fixngumble’s eye. But above all the barn was dry. Once inside, with the doors shut, it was possible to forget about the miserable weather, except for the occasional rattle of rain on the iron roof and the drip into the Weathersnike’s rain gauge.
‘We shall live here for the next hundred years, until the rain stops,’ the King of the Bottersnikes announced. ‘With the Gumbles to do the work. Tomorrow I shall plan the details.’
The Gumbles couldn’t help feeling a bit glum. Besides those things that pleased the ’snikes, they had noticed that the big double doors on either side were heavy and very stiff to open, and that the barn’s one window was securely fastened and covered with wire netting. A green mould grew over the glass, making the inside as gloomy as a dungeon.
‘It’s not going to be easy to get out of here,’ Happigumble muttered, but added hopefully, ‘Tink might come up with something.’
‘Grasshoppers, let’s hope so! Imagine being shut up here for a hundred years.’
Fixngumble refused to be downcast about it. ‘A hundred years! I’ll have us out of here in a hundred minutes. And you can time me,’ he said, ‘from the minute I’ve finished fixing this clock.’ He had taken the back off an alarm clock he’d found on the workbench and was probing the inside with a screwdriver.
‘Aha!’ he began to say, ‘I think I see why …’ The alarm went off with a shattering brrrnnng, making several of the Bottersnikes jump in fright.
‘Bring that thing here,’ the King directed.
‘I’ve fixed the time part, it was only a dead spider blocking the works,’ Fix said. ‘But the alarm goes off whenever it thinks it will.’
The King scowled at the clock, which seemed to grin back cheekily with its hands at ten minutes to two.
‘Wipe that idiotic grin off your face,’ the King ordered it.
Fixngumble moved the hands to twenty past eight, giving the clock a scowling, down-in-the-mouth expression much more to the King’s liking. ‘The time,’ he announced, ‘is twenty past eight exactly. In the morning.’ Though according to the sun it was late afternoon.
‘Time we was still asleep,’ yawned Glob.
Indeed, the band was so dog-tired from dodging the rain and chasing the chariot that a good long sleep seemed more important just then than the huge feed they reckoned they needed to stave off starvation. Some of the band were falling over from tiredness, and Snorg was snoring on his feet because he was too weary to lie down.
But there was the problem of what to do with the Gumbles, to stop them escaping.
This was usually solved by squashing them into jam tins, for Gumbles, being squeezable to almost any shape, become helpless when their legs are crushed tightly in a tin. But the Bottersnikes had not brought tins with them and there were none in the barn.
Chank declared that this time tins were not necessary. ‘They can’t get out of here. The window’s nailed up. The roof’s too high. Some of us can sleep against the doors so’s they can’t pull ’em open. We’ve got ’em! Escape is impossible.’
‘But you can’t trust Gumbles to know what’s impossible and what’s not,’ Glob argued. ‘Put a Gumble through a sausage machine, like as not he’d come out dog biscuits.’
‘Put ’em through a bacon slicer and they’d turn into beef cubes,’ droned Snorg from the depths of his sleep. ‘You can’t trust Gumbles to do the proper thing.’
‘Then what are we going to do with ’em?’ the Bottersnikes said angrily.
The King of the Bottersnikes set down the alarm clock and shouted, ‘Gumbles! Fetch me paint. White paint. Black paint. And a brush.’ From a shelf over the workbench the Gumbles brought tins of paint. Fix prised the lids off with a screwdriver and stirred it, the King watching every move. ‘Glag!’ he bawled.
Glag, the Bottersnike artist, seldom had real paint to paint with. ‘After I’ve had a sleep I’ll make a picture!’ he squealed delightedly. ‘I’ll do a chiaroscuro.’
‘No you won’t, Glag, the world’s in enough of a mess without you painting it. Now get and paint them ’snikes white …’ By whirling a hoe dangerously the King had divided his band into two more or less equal groups ‘… and them ’snikes black. Not all over! A few blobs and splashes will do.’ Glag’s careful brushwork was too slow to get the results the King wanted so he took over the artwork himself, using the paintbrush more like an axe.
‘What’s going on?’ yelled the surprised ’snikes, as they were being whitened. ‘It ain’t bath night, is it?’
‘Now you’re white guards,’ the King said, glaring at Chank, Gubbo, Mudger, Amps and a few others. ‘And you’re the black guards,’ he told Glob, Snorg, Smiggles, Glag and the rest when they had received a similar treatment from the black pot. ‘Four hours on, four hours off, guarding the Gumbles. White guards first.’ By this the King meant the white guards were to guard the Gumbles for four hours while the blacks slept, then the blacks would take over for the next four hours while the whites slept. This arrangement caused a clamour of protest, especially from Snorg.
‘Not fair! Four hours is too long to keep awake and not nearly long enough for a proper sleep.’
‘And if the white guards go to sleep and let the Gumbles go,’ the King went on in a dangerous tone, ‘they will do all the Gumbles’ work for the black guards, and me.’
The King made himself neither a black nor a white guard; he wound the clock and announced he was guard commander and keeper of the time. He lay down on the sofa with the clock on a kerosine tin beside him and went to sleep at once, and the off-duty black guards looked for holes and hiding places to sleep in. Even with a sound roof over their heads the Bottersnikes liked to crawl into or under something, it made them feel secure.
The white guards
looked on enviously, and scowled at the Gumbles. How were they going to keep awake for four hours, they wanted to know, guarding? Gubbo, wandering aimlessly round the barn, punched the keys of the old typewriter. ‘Needs tuning,’ snorted Gubbo, who thought it was a piano.
‘I got it!’ Chank cried ‘I’ll keep the guard awake! I’ll write a story on the typewriter and it’ll be so exciting that sleep is impossible. Gumbles! Find me some paper.’
Bottersnikes like stories, and, strangely enough, animal stories best of all. They like stories about wolves, sharks, Tasmanian devils, vultures, dragons, boa constrictors, gigantic spiders or any creatures with enormous appetites, and these have to be the heroes of the tales, they have to win in the end. A good ’snike story needs plenty of spite and revenge in it, and the happiest of endings for them is a gluttonous feast. None of the Bottersnikes was much good at telling any sort of story except lies, but Chank knew he could do it once he put his brains to work.
‘The most important parts of a story are the beginning, the end and the part in between,’ Chank declared. ‘All the rest will take care of itself. Look at it this way. A story is made of words. Words is made of letters. Now you got 26 letters to choose from, so all you gotta do is mix up those letters the right way and you got the best story ever written. I’m going to mix letters like no one ever mixed ’em before. Hurry up with that paper, you Gumbles.’
The Gumbles were tearing layers from a cement bag, which was the only paper they could find not already printed with something. Fixngumble whispered, ‘I’ve got a plan. I’m going to cut an escape hole in the wall in that dark corner beneath the bench. I’ll need some help. Keep the ’snikes away if you can. It’s going to be noisy though — the wood’s thick and I’ll have to use a saw and probably a hammer and chisel too.’
The Gumbles didn’t see how he could possibly get away with all these carpentry noises, unless the rain began to rattle on the roof, or unless Chank made a really terrific clatter on the typewriter pounding out his story.
The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles Page 11