The Selected Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles
Page 12
Chank loaded a piece of cement bag into his machine and started putting down letters. He wrote:
Qwertyuiop
then stared at what he had written.
‘That’s an uncommonly good title!’ Chank said.
He wrote some more, mixing his letters carefully. Then came to a stop. He read it through. Chuckled. Racked his brains for some more to write. Changed the stop to a comma. He stared at the paper. The paper stared back blankly from the typewriter. Chank’s head began to droop. His brains just wouldn’t rack. His head sank slowly on to the typewriter and all the letters jammed. In a moment the author was fast asleep.
And the other guards were not far behind him. They twitched and jerked as they tried to stop their head drooping; some nearly choked on their own muffled snores. ‘The story!’ Mudger said desperately. ‘Let’s have Chank’s story. You read it,’ he said to Tinkingumble. Chank was a cocky and unpopular ’snike, and if his story was good they didn’t want to have to tell him so. So they let him sleep on.
Tinkingumble climbed up to the typewriter table and read out what Chank had written:
Qwertyuiop
Once upon a time there was a Savage Feersom monster called the Qwertyuiop it had 2006 teeth and a sharp spike on the end of its tale.
There was a long pause.
‘What happened next?’ the white ’snikes demanded impatiently.
‘Nothing. That’s all Chank wrote.’
The author jerked and pounded the table with his fists. ‘I can’t go on! I got a mental block.’
‘Go on with the story, Tink,’ Happigumble whispered, urgent as a telegram. ‘Make something up! Keep ’em occupied while Fix gets to work.’
‘Sto-ry! Sto-ry!’ the Bottersnikes chanted. ‘Go on about the monster with 2006 teeth.’
Tink began, rather nervously: ‘The Qwertyuiop is a — is a medium-sized monster, about as long as two gum trees put together, and stands as high as this barn. It’s the colour of … a two dollar note dipped in sump oil and, er, it has scales on its sides the size of dinner plates.’
‘What does it live on?’ the Bottersnikes wanted to know.
‘Er, water,’ Tink said desperately. He wasn’t in best form today, hadn’t had a tink since they’d been in the barn. ‘You’ll have to help me out,’ he whispered to the others. ‘It’s not easy pushing someone else’s monster.’ Happigumble and Merrigumble climbed on the table with him, and the three sat on the roller of Chank’s typewriter. It was vital now to keep the white guards interested in the monster-story. Fix had his tools ready, saw, hammer, chisel, brace and bit and a pinch bar, and was waiting for a chance to smuggle them beneath the bench where the escape hole was to be cut.
‘The Qwertyuiop,’ Merrigumble said in a bright tone, ‘has an enormous appetite for water. It can drink whole lakes. Dams, like the one outside, it would probably take at a single gulp. But it’s not a very intelligent creature. Its brain is only a granny-knot of nerve endings …’
‘With a stomach like that who needs brains?’ the ’snikes said. ‘Why does it have all those teeth if it lives on water?’
‘The teeth are for biting and splintering trees and things when it gets mad,’ Happigumble put in. ‘It makes dams out of the bits to catch the water it eats. It has a frightful temper.’
The white guards nodded approvingly. ‘So it should.’ They were beginning to like this useful monster that could get rid of so much water and was a nice colour too. ‘Tell us more about it. How many legs does it have?’
‘Four.’ ‘Six.’ ‘Twelve,’ the three storytellers said.
‘Make up your minds,’ the Bottersnikes said angrily. They liked to have a clear picture of their heroes.
‘Four when it’s walking,’ Happigumble said hastily. ‘When it wants to run it grows another pair to help keep its long tail off the ground. And when it has eaten a whole lake of water it needs twelve to hold the weight.’
‘On days like this with floods pouring everywhere the Qwertyuiop has to be able to gallop fast to catch the running water, or it would starve,’ Tinkingumble explained. ‘That’s why it gets so mad.’
‘The poor thing, having to chase its food,’ the ’snikes said. ‘Monsters don’t get a fair go.’
Ratlike scratching noises began to come from beneath the bench, where Fixngumble was scraping the hard clay between the boards. His first job was to make a slot big enough to put the saw in. The story needed some action now, the Gumbles felt, so Merrigumble said: ‘The Qwertyuiop lives in the Dark Forest, just down there. Water is pouring everywhere from all the creeks, and the silly monster just doesn’t know which way to run to catch it. Its mind is quite confused. So it decides to come out of the Forest to find some water it can catch …’
‘But it’s a stupid creature and instead of going down to the river where the water’s calmer it takes the wrong turning and moves towards this barn …’
‘Flattening the trees as it comes …’
‘Pushes over the barbed wire fence …’
‘And comes through the blackberries.’
‘Is this story going to have a happy ending?’ the ’snikes said, fidgeting. They weren’t sleepy any more.
‘It’s mad with rage,’ Tink said, ‘and looking for something to bite and splinter …’
‘Grinding its 2006 teeth, which sounds like wood being scraped,’ Merrigumble shouted. Loudish scraping noises had been coming from beneath the bench, but Fix found the scraping too slow and started bashing with the hammer and chisel to knock out the clay.
‘And pounding its scaly sides with the spike on its own tail, which sounds just like the blows of a hammer,’ Happigumble added.
Toot and Willi, helping Fix, were drilling with the brace, which squeaked as it turned; Fix hadn’t had time to oil it. ‘Its scales get itchy when it’s mad and squeak as if they needed oiling,’ Tink explained.
‘What’s it mad about?’ the Bottersnikes quavered. ‘We ain’t done nothing to it.’
‘The poor monster only wants some calm water to eat,’ Merrigumble said. ‘Perhaps it will break up the barn to make another dam.’
More hefty hammer blows came — Fix was giving it all he’d got. The white ’snikes were definitely nervous now. ‘That monster’s too close. Tell it to go away.’ Fix started to use the saw, Toot and Willi helping with the push-pull. It was desperate, noisy work; the saw was rusty and the wood hard.
‘It’s panting with rage,’ Tink shouted. ‘When it pants with rage it sounds exactly like a rusty saw cutting wood.’
There was a furious banging with the hammer — or with the Qwertyuiop’s tail — then, unmistakably, the splintering of wood. Fix had broken through. The white guards panicked. ‘Wake up! Wake up! There’s a mad Qwertyuiop outside and it’s busting up the barn.’
Two quite unexpected noises came then, which astonished the Gumbles more than the white guards. The first was the loudest toot that Tootngumble had ever given. He made himself jump from the suddenness of it. Almost immediately the alarm clock rang. From the empty kero tin where the King had put it, it shrilled loud enough to make the bark split on the Dark Forest gum trees. It woke the black guards, woke the King. Over the clamour and panic in the barn, the voice of the guard commander and keeper of the time rose in a huge bellow:
‘Count the Gumbles and change the guard!’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND ILLUSTRATOR
SYDNEY ALEXANDER (S. A.) WAKEFIELD (1927–2009) received much recognition for his writing, and in 1991 Captain Deadlight’s Treasure was shortlisted for the CBC awards. But he is best known for his Bottersnikes and Gumbles series of children’s books, all of which were illustrated by Desmond Digby.
DESMOND DIGBY (1933–2015) was born in Auckland, and after studying at the Slade School of Art he moved to Australia and worked as a set and costume designer with Opera Australia, the Australian Ballet and the Elizabethan Trust Opera. He illustrated Waltzing Matilda by A. B. Paterson and also designed covers for Patrick White’s
novels. His paintings are held by most of Australia’s major galleries.
COPYRIGHT
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks, Australia
‘Running Down to the Beach’, ‘Willigumble — Late as Usual’,
‘The Adventures of Chank’, ‘Spring in the Air’ and ‘The King’s Party’
first published in Bottersnikes and Gumbles by William Collins (Australia) Pty Ltd in 1967
‘Supergumble’, ‘The Palace-mobile’, ‘The Art of Catching Gumbles’,
‘The Artist and the Dreamer’ and ‘Dump Development Scheme’
first published in Gumbles on Guard by William Collins (Australia) Pty Ltd in 1975
‘Hot and Strong’, ‘Tinkingumble and the Dry Water’ and ‘Casting the Votes’
first published in Gumbles in Summer by William Collins (Australia) Pty Ltd in 1979
‘The Dark Forest’, ‘Gumbleducks’ and ‘The Qwertyuiop’
first published in Gumbles in Trouble by William Collins (Australia) Pty Ltd in 1990
This edition published in Australia in 2016
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Text copyright individual editions © S. A. Wakefield 1967, 1975, 1979, 1989
Text copyright Selected Adventures edition © Betty Wakefield 2016
Illustrations copyright individual editions © Desmond Digby 1967, 1975, 1979, 1989
Illustrations copyright Selected Adventures edition © Brendan Gillis 2016
The rights of S. A. Wakefield and Desmond Digby to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work have been asserted under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Wakefield, S. A. (Sydney Alexander), 1927– author.
The selected adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles / S A Wakefield ; illustrated by D Digby.
ISBN: 978 1 4607 5192 3 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0673 2 (ebook)
For children.
Animals, Mythical—Juvenile fiction.
Digby, Desmond, 1933– illustrator.
A823.3
Cover design by Sam Williams
Cover illustration by Desmond Digby