by Tamara Gray
Soon the torch guttered and the flame was swallowed by darkness. Arcas gave a little grunt of fear and made his way back towards the entrance. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he stumbled, but to keep himself steady he fixed his mind on the star bears on the ceiling. Outside the cave, night had fallen. Snow glistened and the moon was up and brightly shining. Arcas’s breath made a cloud when he howled again for his mother. She didn’t come. He thought he heard a rustling ahead of him in the forest and he scampered in, calling ‘Mother, mother where are you?’ His voice echoed around him. His mother should be home by now, but which way was home? Pine trees stretched in all directions around him, every one looked familiar but wasn’t. Arcas was lost.
Arcas may have been a small bear, but he was resourceful and brave. The tallest tree you ever saw stood at the centre of a clearing in front of him. It was a redwood tree, and its trunk was as wide and huge as a cathedral spire rising before him. Arcas reached his paws to the lowest branches and hoisted himself up. He began to climb. It was a joyful feeling, skimming up the redwood tree. Soon he was high above the other trees in the forest, hugging the trunk, inching his way up and up to the top. The air was cold at the top of the tree, and the night sky floated above the forest like an inky scarf scattered with diamonds. Arcas felt weightless and free. He could see the happy star bears from the cave paintings gambolling and playing on the horizon, and the star path which his mother had told him was called the Milky Way shimmered ahead of him. It was then he saw Callista, twinkling at him from the top of the world. Suddenly he knew what to do. He stretched out his tiny tail to balance himself, and he shut his eyes. Taking a deep breath, Arcas stepped out onto the Milky Way and he walked into the night sky towards his mother.
The Intrepid Dumpling’s
Dugong Story
by Louisa Young
One day the Intrepid Dumpling turned up at the court of the Troll Queen. They were lying on her sofa after dinner and the Troll Queen said, ‘Tell me a story’.
‘What about?’ asked the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘A dugong,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Once upon a time,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling, ‘a beautiful young dugong was strolling through the forest,flapping her floppy feet and bending her skinny knees, so her fluffy round body rose and fell among the ferns the way dugongs do…’
‘Hold on a minute,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘You don’t know what a dugong is, do you?’
‘I didn’t think they were,’ confessed the Intrepid Dumpling. ‘I thought you wanted me to invent one.’
‘A dugong is a sea cow,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘It’s like a giant seal, or very beautiful sea lion. In the Olden Days sailors used to mistake them for mermaids.’
‘I thought it would be like an ostrich,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘Well it’s not,’ said the Troll Queen. ‘Go on.’
The Intrepid Dumpling started again, and this is the story she told:
Once upon a time, a beautiful young dugong and her old, old grandmother were splashing along the beach, dipping their noses in the rockpools, looking for oysters to do business with. The reason they were doing it was this: the King of the Dugongs had a son, who was absolutely horrible. He was as slimy and grimy and horrible as our dugong was sleek and golden and sprightly. He had atrocious manners and only ever thought about himself (our dugong, on the other hand, was kind and courteous, and particularly good to her old Grandma).
Well, the King of the Dugongs wanted his son to get married, and he wanted him to marry someone wonderful, because that way, he said, he had a chance of getting some halfway decent grandchildren. And he wanted him to marry soon because the sooner the halfway decent grandchildren were born, the sooner they would be old enough to take over from their horrible father, and save the Dugong Kingdom from a terrible ruler.
So the King of the Dugongs rang up all his friends on his beautiful long curly shell telephone and asked them who was the best and nicest and cleverest young dugong girl in the kingdom.
The first three girls who were suggested were indeed very good and nice. They were thoughtful and clean and intelligent and one even had a sense of humour. But they were also rich, and their kind thoughtful intelligent rich parents were so upset at the prospect of their daughters marrying the bilious scurrilous prince that they each took the Dugong King aside in turn and had a word in his lustrous furry ear. As each of them whispered in turn, the King’s face went from hopeful to sad to hopeful to ashamed to resigned. Each of the parents gave the King a large cheque and, because the Dugong Prince’s extravagant gambling habit and taste for expensive foreign ice-creams had almost bankrupted the Dugong Kingdom, the King shamefacedly accepted the money and let the nice young dugong girls go home to their fond families and relieved boyfriends.
And this is where our dugong comes in - because our dugong was the fourth best and nicest dugong girl in all the kingdom (according to some. Others felt she was nicer than that). And our dugong had one quality that the other three had lacked - she was penniless. Her old grandmother couldn’t afford a large cheque, and that is why, on that cloudy day, the two of them were splashing along the beach, trying to persuade the oysters to part with their pearls. They hoped they might collect something to offer the King in place of our dugong’s flipper in marriage.
They weren’t doing very well. And their hearts weren’t really in it, because they knew that the oysters needed their pearls for a rainy day. Even though they could grow new ones, few of them could afford to give up their nest eggs. So our dugong and her Grandma had only collected three pearls when a palace guard appeared, saying ‘Tssccchh! We’ve been looking for you everywhere. You have to come to the palace, right now.’ And then our dugong gave even those three pearls away, to a tattered family of little sea squirts who had lost their mother, sitting by the side of the road leading to the King of the Dugongs’ strange and beautiful underwater palace.
‘Whatever shall we do?’ whispered Grandma, as they were ushered in to the King of the Dugongs’ palatial audience chamber. It was lined with conch shells as pink and shiny as the curlicues down on our dugong’s pretty ears, and illuminated by thousands of iridescent squid, whose luminous multi-coloured tentacles dangled from the murky, cavernous depths of the ceiling. Beneath them hovered tiny gleaming jellyfish, red and gold and green, whose job was to dash to the side of anybody who didn’t have enough light to read by.
‘Oh Lawdy,’ said Grandma, looking up through the crowd of shining courtiers to the dais where the King sat resplendent on a huge plush sea cucumber. ‘Oh Lawdy.’ For beside the King, sprawled across a smaller cucumber, covered in gungey barnacles, whiskers dripping with slime, eyes dull and shifty, snout curled in a sneer and flippers stained yellow from smoking, lounged the Dugong Prince. Even his nasty ears were limp and unfriendly.
Oh Lawdy Lawdy,’ said Grandma. ‘Oh Lawdy Lawdy Lawdy.’ But our dugong just looked at the horrible prince, shook her pretty golden head, blinked her dark golden eyes, and set to thinking.
Then the King stood up, and coughed, and addressed them. ‘Um… excuse me!’ he said. ‘Could you come over here?’
Our dugong and Grandma slithered between the courtiers (silver and crimson) up to the front of the dais, and looked up at the king. No-one else was taking any notice of him at all; they were all too busy flapping their flippers and wiggling their fins and wrinkling up their snouts. But then the King coughed again, very loudly, and said: ‘Oy, you lot, straighten up, would you?’ And all the courtiers sprang to attention in elegant and impressive rows against the pink curly walls.
‘Now,’ said the Dugong King.
‘Oh no,’ whispered Grandma.
‘Ahhh,’ sighed the courtiers.
‘Well actually,’ said our dugong, ‘it’s all right.’
‘Is it?’ said the King, in surprise. ‘I’m sure it’s not. You see, I want you to… I’m so sorry, my dear, but I want you to marry him. He’s just got to have decent children, you
see, or just imagine what everyone will have to put up with when he’s king…’
The Dugong Prince was picking his snout, ignoring everyone.
‘And you see,’ continued the King, ‘You’re the best and nicest girl in the kingdom who’s not rich enough to get out of it. You even gave those seasquirts the three pearls which were your only hope of escape from marrying that…’ and the King gestured towards his son, who was rolling up a big bogey between his flippers.
‘But it’s all right,’ said our dugong.
The Prince opened up his mouth to pop the bogey in.
‘I’ve already decided to marry him.’
The Prince’s mouth opened wide with astonishment.
‘I’ll marry him happily,’ she said. ‘Someone has to,
and it might as well be me, if you want me. I’ll be glad
to marry him.’
At that the Prince opened his mouth so wide that the top of his horrible head began to fall back, and back, and back. And suddenly it fell off entirely, and the ever-widening astonished mouth split the slimy green barnacled head right in half. And then out of the scummy green throat came a cry—and suddenly the whole limp, splodgy, scurfy body fell in two, and from it leapt a handsome young dugong as sleek and dark and golden and sprightly as our own, with perky whiskers and a dashing look in his eye.
‘Dad!’ he cried. ‘I’m so sorry! Do you remember when I ran off when I was four? I stole some of Neptune’s apples and he cursed me with horribleness so no-one would marry me. He said that only someone volunteering to marry me of their own accord would break the spell! Nasty, eh? But you—’ and here he turned to our dugong, clasped her to his sleek bosom and gazed into her golden eyes ‘—you have saved me and the Kingdom from a horrible fate.’ And on the spot he presented her with a crown of trained seahorses, who would swim in circles above her golden brow, and a pair of beautiful seahorse earrings, who would swim forever just beneath her pretty ears, and every now and then wiggle up to whisper jokes into them, for seahorses are famous for their sense of humour.
The Intrepid Dumpling leaned back on the sofa and looked at the Troll Queen expectantly. The Troll Queen looked back.
‘Then what happened?’ she asked.
‘They got married and lived happily ever after, of course,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling. ‘Don’t you know anything about stories?’
‘Well you didn’t say so,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Well they did,’ said the Intrepid Dumpling.
‘I thought it might be different this time,’ said the Troll Queen.
‘Oh no,’ said the Dugong. ‘It’s just the same. That’s one of the nicest things about stories.’
The Loris
by Romesh Gunesekera
How The Loris Learnt What To Do
My name is Lorrie and I usually like to take things easy. I am a very slow slender loris.
I live in a tree with my mother. My tree is tall and I have a spot of my own about fifty feet up from the ground. I can see right across the pond to the mango trees on the other side. From the first time I saw the fruit, I wanted to go over and eat one. But my mother had said, ‘Don’t bother. By the time you get there, the mangoes would have fallen. The season would be over.’
I didn’t believe her. I could see the mangoes grow bigger, turn from green to yellow and ripen ever so slowly. Green parrots flew in and pecked at them. The fruit didn’t fall for ages. I told my mother, ‘Look, they are still there.’
Her large unblinking eyes softened. ‘It is a long way to go around the water. It will take you many, many nights. You will have to avoid the grassland on the left and stick to the trees. You will have to go so far in, you will lose sight of the water. The moon will vanish. You might get lost in enemy territory. There are many predators: leopards, pythons, dragons. But even if you don’t get lost, by the time you get to the mangoes, the fruit will be rotten. We are slow movers.’
I don’t know why she didn’t even want me to try.
* * *
The rains came. There was thunder in the sky. In the north and the south, big animals waged war. We slept. I like to sleep. I like to dream. Sometimes even when my eyes are open, I am dreaming. My favourite dream is about mangoes. Green mangoes slowly turning yellow like the sun. In my dream I eat the sun. I feel warm inside and everything becomes night. Then, in my dream, I move like a dream. Fast as light falling at dusk.
* * *
Last week, I saw them again. Small, round, green bobbles on the trees across the pond appeared like a starburst in a faraway galaxy. Each one destined to turn into a sun, in the shape of a teardrop. An island. A day later nothing much had changed. I remembered what had happened last season and reckoned I had quite a few nights to get over to the mangoes. I couldn’t disappear for that long without telling my mother, so I told her.
‘It is too dangerous,’ she said. ‘Please, don’t go.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You will be able to see me most of the time. It is only between the coconut trees that I will be out of sight. I’ll bring you back a mango.’
‘I don’t want a mango,’ she said. ‘I want you to be safe here.’
‘Don’t you want me to do what I dream of doing?’
‘I do.’
‘Then, let me go,’ I said and hugged her.
* * *
It took me three nights to get to the water’s edge and another three to get to the breadfruit tree that stretched over the stream. Progress was slow because I had to test each branch I used. Some were weak and would bend for the weight of a swallow. Others were short and I could not easily reach a connecting one. Sometimes I had to retrace my steps. But there was never any danger. I heard no other animals in the trees, up where I climbed. The monkeys were too heavy for my branches, even the tree squirrels couldn’t get close. Although I once heard a leopard coughing at the water, it did not frighten me. He would have had no way of reaching me and even when my branches dipped we were still way up in the safe canopy of the jungle. The difficulty was the breadfruit tree. The branch that bridged the stream was as big as an elephant’s leg. Anything could walk on it. It would take me from dusk to dawn to get across as my top speed is only about three feet an hour and I can keep that up only for a couple of hours at a time. If an enemy came while I was crossing, I would be in trouble. Big trouble.
I spent the afternoon watching the heron fishing in the pond. He is always on his own, stooped and morose. When he catches a fish he shows no mercy, gobbling it up straightaway. Sometimes he raises his grey wings like an avatar, but he has nothing to offer us. I like it when the fish jump just out of his reach and make ripples in the purple water like anger in his mind. Then he becomes a little dizzy and wobbles.
As the sun sank behind the trees, and the bats started to launch out into the black sky, one after another, I inched down towards the lower branches of the big tree. The biggest branch, when I reached it, was knotted and spongy. It was peculiarly furry and prickled my hands and feet. I felt it move in the slow rhythm of a sleeper’s breath. It dawned on me that I was walking across a leopard’s back. When I reached its ear, the leopard woke up. I quickly slid down a few inches. The leopard slowly stretched and stood up but did not notice me. I am very light. Then, to my amazement, he crept along the branch, ferrying me to the other side. On the ground he moved swiftly and took me all the way to the mango trees. What a thrill to move at such speed!
When I saw my dream fruit, I grabbed a passing cane and parted company. The leopard rushed into the undergrowth and vanished.
I had learnt my most important lesson: what you can’t do by yourself, you might be able to do with the help of someone else.
By the time I reached the branches where the fruit hung like coloured drops, a few had begun to ripen. I found one that a red-beaked parrot had ripped open. Inside the skin, in the golden soft fruit, I discovered heaven. I had never tasted anything so delicious. I ate and ate and ate, high up in the trees, safe and sweet. I ate all
afternoon and all night. My dream had come true. I felt I was eating the sun.
Then, in the early morning, when the light was struggling to wake, to break out of the clouds, the sky seemed to get very angry with me. A howling and shrieking filled the air. Piercing screams. A huge metal bird burst out of the clouds and swooped down. The breadfruit tree exploded. The thunder was deafening. More explosions followed, one after the other, and the heat of several suns colliding singed the trees around me. A moment later, an enormous fire blazed and tree after tree ignited. The fire rushed towards me. I was petrified. Some humans appeared with guns. They fired at the sky. Another metal bird screamed down with its fiery droppings. More explosions. Mangoes fell to the ground. Branches. Trees. Birds. Monkeys.
I said goodbye to my mother, in my heart. I was sorry. Perhaps I should have heeded her. But I was not sorry to have tasted the mango. Even if our world was destroyed, at least I had tasted heaven. Was that bad? Should I not have done it? Was this onslaught somehow my fault?
I shifted a few inches down the branch. The fire was moving as fast as my thoughts, speeding over the ground, crackling twigs and grass and bushes. Animals I had never seen so close before broke out of the bush just ahead of the flames: pigs, iguanas, wild cats and deer. Then my leopard appeared. A human saw it and fired a shot. The leopard growled. The man dropped his gun and fled. The leopard leapt over the flames and came towards the mango trees. He stopped under my tree and looked back over his shoulder. My steps may be slow, but in my head I can think as fast as anyone.