by Tom Fletcher
“What are you doing, Dad?” William said, completely confused.
“Stay here, Willypoos.” And with those words, Mr. Trundle marched fearlessly out into the street and toward the Hunter.
“Dad! Stop! He’ll shoot you!” cried William.
“No, he won’t,” said Mr. Trundle as he turned and looked William in the eye. “He’s my brother.”
William’s world was whizzing around him. Of all the impossible things he’d experienced that night, his father’s last words were by far the most utterly mind-blowingly unbelievable.
As he watched his dad step out into the street, standing between the Hunter’s raised rifle and the distant dinosaur, William searched his brain, searched his heart. Could that wretched man, standing like a statue carved out of pure evilness, really be his uncle?
“Hello, Huxley.” Mr. Trundle’s voice interrupted William’s thoughts.
“Huxley? Now, that’s a name I’ve not been called in a very long time,” sneered the Hunter, keeping his rifle raised.
“You’ve gone too far this time, Hux. Even by your standards,” said Mr. Trundle.
“Well, I couldn’t have done it without you, Robert,” said the Hunter with a sly grin. “If it hadn’t been for this beautiful Christmas card, I might never have found a way to catch Fatty Claus and his sleigh.” The Hunter reached inside his leathery coat pocket and pulled out the Trundles’ traditional Christmas card with the photo of Mr. Trundle and William on the front.
William gasped.
The Christmas cards they sent each year to their distant relatives! Great-Nana Joan, Second Cousin Sam…Uncle H. Trundle.
H. Trundle…
Huxley Trundle!
William suddenly knew it was true. All of it.
The Hunter was his uncle!
“Santa! It was my dad. He was the other little boy in the North Pole, wasn’t he?” William asked.
Santa nodded.
It all became clear to William.
“That’s why Dad loves Christmas so much. That’s how he knows so much about it,” William realized.
“And why he’s devoted his whole life since then to being good,” Santa said, and William remembered that his father had been banished from the North Pole.
“This has to end. Now. Put the gun down,” Mr. Trundle said firmly as he stood blocking the Hunter’s shot.
“If you think I won’t pull this trigger because you’re my brother, then you are in for a very nasty shock,” the Hunter said with evil honesty.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Hux. We’re family.”
“Family? Pah!” spat the Hunter. “I know what family means to you. I know what you’re really after, what your pathetic Christmas cards and countless letters over the years have really been for—money. My money! Slicing you out of my life all those years ago was the best thing I ever did.”
“You’ve got it all wrong, my brother,” replied Mr. Trundle. “I don’t want the family money. I never have! Money causes more trouble than it’s worth. That stuff has rotted your heart, Hux, but I want to buy it back with kindness.” And as Mr. Trundle said those words, he offered his hand for his brother to shake. “A full heart is worth more than a full wallet.”
The Hunter paused. One eye was still glued to the sight of his rifle while the other flickered momentarily to Mr. Trundle’s outstretched hand.
“You have precisely three seconds to get out of the way—or I’ll blast you out of the way!” the Hunter said coldy as he closed his eye and took aim.
William knew that he wasn’t bluffing. “Dad!” he called out.
“Three…,” said the Hunter, his beady black eye plastered to the sight. Mr. Trundle didn’t budge.
“Two….This isn’t a game, little brother,” the Hunter warned.
Mr. Trundle stayed put, defending the Christmasaurus.
“One.”
The gunshot rang out, deafeningly loud as it tore through the street. It knocked Mr. Trundle off his feet and sent him soaring through the air, before he landed in a heap on the pavement.
“DAD!” William screamed, tears exploding uncontrollably from his eyes.
The Hunter turned and faced William, the barrel of his smoking rifle pointing dangerously in the boy’s direction. “Unless you want to say ta-ta to Santa Claus as well as your father tonight, you had better keep your mouth shut,” whispered the Hunter.
William continued crying silently, not taking his eyes from his father’s body, lying motionless on the snow.
“Growler, it’s time,” said the Hunter as he turned back toward the shadowy dinosaur and crept up the street.
As soon as the Hunter and his mutt had walked a few yards away and were focused on their prey, William made a silent dash for his dad, closely followed by Santa. As William reached his father, tears filled his eyes so that he couldn’t see. He sobbed and sobbed.
“Willypoos? Is that you?” whispered a soft, shaky voice.
“Dad! You’re alive?” said William in amazement, quickly wiping away the tears.
Mr. Trundle sat up on the pavement, looking completely confused.
“Yes…I suppose I am!” he said with surprise.
“Well, stuff my turkey!” Santa said in a jolly hushed voice as he pointed at a smoking bullet hole in Mr. Trundle’s woolly Christmas sweater.
Mr. Trundle placed his hand over his heart with a smile. Then he reached down inside the top of his sweater and pulled out something he had been wearing around his neck.
It was a thin, worn piece of brown leather, and when he reached the end, William noticed that something was attached to it.
“The piece of reindeer antler!” William gasped in amazement as the pointy, branchlike piece of horn popped out of Mr. Trundle’s sweater.
“I’ve worn it around my neck all these years,” Mr. Trundle said, looking up at Santa.
He dangled the small piece of antler that his evil brother had cut from the flying reindeer those many Christmases ago. And when Santa and William leaned in closer, they saw…
“The bullet!” William and Santa said at the same time. It was lodged deep inside the piece of antler.
“It saved my life!” said Mr. Trundle.
“Well, there’s one more life in need of saving right now!” Santa said in a deeply troubled voice, staring up the street. Mr. Trundle and William peeked out from their hiding place behind their neighbor’s snow-covered car. They saw the Hunter silently slip a sleek bullet into his repulsive rifle, lift it to his bloodshot eyeball, and release a puff of thick smoke from his pipe. Then they heard that awful, heart-stopping sound again:
One single gunshot was all it took. It was violently loud as it zoomed down the street toward the shadowy dinosaur.
“NO!” William screamed.
But it was too late.
The Hunter had hit his target.
The sun was gleaming, but there was no dinosaur silhouette anymore. There was only a shadowy heap, lying very still in the distance where the dinosaur had been.
“YIPPEE! Yahoo! HOORAY! It’s mine. I did it! Did you see that shot, Growler, you silly old mutt? I shot him! I SHOT HIM! HA!” The Hunter screamed and cheered and celebrated with a vile dance in the middle of the street, whooping and waving at the sky.
As he danced his wicked celebration, light, fluffy snowflakes started descending from above.
William was crying. Santa was crying. Mr. Trundle was crying. There was nothing they could have done to stop it. It was game over. The Hunter had won.
He had killed the Christmasaurus.
“Growler, stay! Keep an eye on Fatty and the boy. Don’t let them go anywhere—I’ll deal with them in a minute. I’m going to fetch my prize,” said the Hunter, and Growler immediately turned his dirty, matted face toward the tearful trio sobbing behind the car.
The Hunter puffe
d merrily on his pipe and whistled a little tune as he strutted proudly down the street.
“Foolish dinosaur. Coming back to save your friends, were you? Ha! It was all too easy!” he cackled at the motionless dinosaur-shaped lump in the shadows ahead, while wafting away the irritating snowflakes that had begun falling on his hard, scarred face.
Suddenly, something got stuck in his mouth. It was soft and fluffy.
“Ptooey,” he spat. Then more of this odd falling fluff started brushing his face, getting in his eyes.
“What the devil is this?” he said, and then he suddenly realized something most peculiar.
They weren’t snowflakes falling from the sky….
They were feathers!
“Feathers?” the Hunter said, waving them away from his face. They were falling as thick as a blizzard all around. The closer he got to the body of the dinosaur, the thicker this feather storm seemed to get. “Is this some sort of trick?”
As the falling feathers cleared, he could see the lifeless lump of the body he had shot.
“No, it can’t be…,” muttered the Hunter in disbelief.
Lying on the ground where he’d expected to see the Christmasaurus was William’s beautiful stuffed dinosaur toy!
It was as close to a perfect replica of the Christmasaurus as you could get. Slightly smaller, of course, but from a distance you would never have been able to tell the two apart—and the Hunter certainly couldn’t, even through his super-zoom telescopic sight!
He marched over to it, with his rifle aimed at its perfectly stitched head.
“No!” he gasped as he gazed into two lifeless golden buttons staring up from the snow. There was now a large bullet hole in the toy dinosaur’s side, and its feathery stuffing was leaking out into the Christmas morning air and blowing away in the light breeze.
“But…but he must be here somewhere!” the Hunter whined. “I heard him roar with my own ears! He must still be close!”
And he was.
As the Hunter stood cursing at his misfortune, screaming angrily at the wounded stuffed dinosaur on the ground, something was creeping up behind him.
From the other end of the street, the crying crowd of criers quickly wiped away their tears as they saw something wonderful.
Something tremendous.
Something ferocious!
It was the Christmasaurus, but he looked different from the way he’d looked before. More dinosaur-like.
Protective.
Fierce…
The Hunter spun on the spot to find himself standing in the looming shadow of the Christmasaurus. He was face to face with an angry dinosaur. For the first time in his life, the Hunter was being hunted!
“W-w-wait just a clock tick!” the Hunter said nervously as he started backing away from the approaching dinosaur. “I wasn’t really going to hang you on my wall. This is all just…just…a misunderstanding….”
But as he spoke, he was fiddling with something behind his back.
It was his rifle, and it was reloaded and ready to fire again!
In a flash, the Hunter swung around his rifle and aimed it straight at the Christmasaurus’s head. The Hunter was fast, and before the Christmasaurus had a chance to react, he placed his bloodshot eye on the telescopic sight and was ready to pull the trigger. He would not miss this time!
But as his finger tightened, something came hurtling through the air at tremendous speed.
It was a small, hard, perfectly made snowball, and it flew down the street toward the Hunter with such incredible speed and accuracy that there was no way he could avoid being hit.
The unexpected ball of snow knocked the rifle straight out of the Hunter’s bony fingers before he could pull the trigger!
The Hunter looked up just in time to see a giant set of white, glistening, razor-sharp dinosaur teeth coming toward him….
The Hunter was gone.
The Christmasaurus had swallowed him whole.
There was nothing left of that beastly evil man.
The Christmasaurus let out a big, stinky
that stank of pipe smoke and money, and that was the last anyone ever saw of the Hunter.
“You’re alive! YOU’RE ALIVE!” William cried as he came whizzing down the street as fast as his wheelchair could whiz him. He flung his arms around the Christmasaurus’s neck and gave him the biggest hug. “Thank you!” he said. “You saved us! You came back and you saved us all!”
Mr. Trundle came running down the street after William, his mouth hanging open in complete shock at the sight of the Christmasaurus.
“Dad. This is the Christmasaurus! He’s my best friend!” William said.
“How do you do? Merry Christmas…,” said Mr. Trundle nervously.
“It’s OK—he’s perfectly safe! We visited the museum tonight, and he flew me all the way to the North Pole, and we met all the elves and ate a magic candy cane and—well, it’s been quite an adventure, really,” explained William. “Where’s Santa?”
Just then, Santa came flying down from the sky in his enormous sleigh and landed it next to them in the street.
“William, William, William! That was one incredible snowball you threw there. Perfect shape, perfect size, perfect throw, perfect timing! Well done, you!” Santa applauded.
“It wasn’t me who threw that snowball,” said William.
Santa and Mr. Trundle looked completely puzzled.
“What do you mean? If it wasn’t you, dear lad, then who on earth was it?” asked Santa.
William hadn’t actually seen who’d thrown the snowball, but there was only one person he knew who could throw something with such unbelievable accuracy. He turned his wheelchair around and pointed his finger toward the sad, un-Christmassy-looking house on their street. The only house without Christmas decorations.
“You can come out, Brenda! It’s OK!” William called.
The little bush in the front yard gave a wobble, and out popped the perfect golden-blond twirls of Brenda Payne.
“Well, well, well, who’s this? I don’t recall dropping into your house last night!” puzzled Santa.
“No, you wouldn’t, Santa,” said William. “This is Brenda Payne. She’s on…the other list,” he whispered.
“Ooooooh,” said Santa. “Awkward!”
“It’s OK,” Brenda said nervously as she took tiny baby steps toward them. “I deserve it,” she admitted, and William saw that little smile creep into a corner of her mouth as she gazed up at Santa, unable to look at anything other than the impossibly magical man in red.
The Christmasaurus stomped his feet in the snow and gave Santa and William a very stern look. They both knew what he was saying.
“Brenda, my dear, what you have done here tonight took courage and bravery. It showed that deep down you care, that you are kind, and that you have the ability to put others first. If those aren’t the sorts of deeds that get a kid on the Nice List these days, then I don’t know what are!” said Santa warmly.
“You mean—I’m…I’m NICE?” asked Brenda, sounding more surprised than anyone.
“Brenda Payne, I hereby declare that you are no longer on the Naughty List!” bellowed Santa in a very official-sounding tone.
Everyone cheered and whooped, and Brenda gave William a huge, squeezy hug.
“Well, William, Brenda, Mr. Trundle, I think it’s time for me to be going. It’s Christmas morning, and I really shouldn’t be parking the sleigh in the middle of the street like this. Traffic officers don’t take any Christmas holidays, you know. I put them all on the Naughty List years ago,” explained Santa.
“But how did you know to come back?” William asked the Christmasaurus. “How did you know we were in danger?”
The Christmasaurus shook his head.
“I don’t think that’s the reason he came back, Wil
liam!” Santa said as the Christmasaurus moved out of the way to reveal the remains of the stuffed toy dinosaur lying on the ground. “You left your toy behind in the North Pole. I think he was just trying to bring it back to you!”
The Christmasaurus nodded, his tongue flapping happily out of his mouth.
“And it’s a good job too, or we might all have ended up as heads above the Hunter’s fireplace!” William exclaimed, and everybody burst out in laughter at the thought.
Then William noticed something red, white, and scrumptious reflecting the sunlight on the ground next to Stuffy.
“My piece of candy cane!” William cried, and scooped it up.
Only something was different. Something had changed!
As he turned it over in his hands, he saw that the writing that ran through it that had once said his name now read: BOB TRUNDLE.
William’s eyes lit up with excitement.
“Does this mean…?” He looked hopefully up at Santa, who was smiling back down at him. “That my dad is…?”
“UN-BANISHED!” Santa boomed with a merry laugh, and William handed over the magical piece of North Pole protection confectionery into Mr. Trundle’s trembling hands.
“I don’t know what to say!” gulped Mr. Trundle with tears of happiness in his eyes.
“Say you’ll come and visit!” said Santa.
Suddenly, there was a loud WOOF! from behind them. They all turned to see Growler, the Hunter’s dog, sitting in the snowy street, looking very lost and alone.
“Hmmm,” Santa said. “I wonder if there might be some good in this dog after all?”
They all saw that something was different in the hound’s eyes. Now that the Hunter was gone, he looked happier, nicer. “I wonder, Brenda, if you might be able to show him the love and kindness that you have shown here tonight?” Santa said.