by Jamie Rix
But today Ping did not like being there because it reminded him that he was useless at being English. And if he couldn’t be English, the rangers wouldn’t pick him to go to London. The dream would be over and Ping would just have to content himself with the humdrum life he already had—forty more years of bamboo, poos, and touristy smiles. There must be another way, he thought as he drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
P
ing’s mother always said, “Things look better after a good night’s sleep.” But when Ping woke up the following morning, the only change he noticed was that his stomach had emptied and his bladder had filled. Neither of which made the world look particularly better.
As he was sitting in the forest sucking on a soggy stick of bamboo, Hui flew down from the uppermost branch of a katsura tree and landed on Ping’s shoulder.
“Hello, Hui,” Ping said. “I’m not going to London.”
“Good,” laughed Hui brightly.
“I’ll never be an English gentleman.”
“Even better!”
Ping regarded the bird suspiciously.
“Even better? How can you possibly say that? You were the one who encouraged me to go to London Zoo in the first place!”
“Because London’s old news,” replied Hui. “I overheard the tall ranger talking at breakfast this morning, and apparently this panda exchange program is happening in Australia, too.”
“Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” Ping was excited now. “I’ve heard of Australia! Remind me where it is again.”
“Well, if you imagine the earth to be a round, juicy lychee,” Hui explained, “China would be right in the middle, while England would be at the top, and Australia underneath at the bottom.”
“Oh, yes, I like the sound of underneath,” smiled Ping.
“Why?” asked Hui.
“Because that means that everything in Australia must be upside down.”
“How do you figure that?”
“When a fruit fly lands on the bottom of a lychee, it hangs upside down, doesn’t it?” said Ping. “So it stands to reason that people and animals would hang upside down in Australia, too.”
“Forgive me, but I fail to see why that would be a good thing,” said Hui.
“It’s not a question of good or bad. It’s different,” said the panda cub.
So Ping wrote a second letter and addressed it to the pandas in Adelaide Zoo. He requested any information they could give him on the Australian way of life so that he could impress the Wolagong rangers with his knowledge of that country and prove himself the most suitable candidate for the exchange program.
Hui delivered the letter—and a week later, Ping received a letter in reply.
Well, if that was what Aussie pandas did, Ping would have to learn how to do it, too.
“But Sichuan Province is miles from any sea,” said Hui, who foresaw big trouble if Ping went hunting the surf in Wolagong.
“How else am I going to show the rangers that I’m perfect for the exchange program?” protested Ping. “Teach me how to surf, dude.”
“But it’s stupidly dangerous, and you don’t like water.”
Ping tried to sound cool.
“Fear is only fun, but spelled differently,” he said casually.
“Now you sound ridiculous—just like your mother,” observed Hui. “Besides, where are you going to find a three-foot wave to surf on in the Wolagong Nature Reserve?”
The panda cub’s eyes twinkled with mischief.
“Have you never heard of the River Trickle?” he asked.
“Of course I have,” said the grandala bird. “It slides slowly down the face of Mount Tranquil like a teardrop. But it’s called the Trickle for a reason, Ping. It’s a trickle! You couldn’t surf a leaf on that.”
“Maybe not as it is,” said Ping ominously, “but there’s a saying. From teeny tiny trickles do massive great roaring rivers flow.”
“Oh, dear,” muttered Hui nervously. “Why do I think we’re all going to get wet?”
CHAPTER SIX
N
eedless to say, Ping had made up that saying about “great roaring rivers,” but it sounded like the sort of thing a clever person would say, and besides, it perfectly described his cunning plan.
So, he decided that the first thing to do was to build himself a surfboard out of bamboo poles—and then swell the River Trickle by adding lots of water.
For the next few days, Ping left the family enclosure early in the morning and came back late at night, exhausted and covered in dirt. His sister, An, who liked discovering secrets, was bursting to know what he was up to, and after three nights of mysterious brotherly silence, she finally snapped.
“I can’t bear it any longer,” she said to him on the third night. “What are you up to? You’re gone all day and when you do come home you jump straight into bed without a bath.”
“None of your business,” he replied, resting his head on his paws and closing his eyes. “Let’s just say I’m looking after my future.”
“You’re digging a tunnel to England, aren’t you, so that you can crawl to London Zoo!”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” laughed Ping, keeping his answer irritatingly vague.
“So what are you doing?” she persisted, rolling over and prodding him in the ribs.
Ping stood up and slipped something out from underneath his mattress of rhododendron leaves. It was one and a half feet long and looked like a large bamboo tea tray.
“You’re planning to serve tea?” she asked, confused.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said secretively.
“You’re planning to serve English tea to the rangers so that they will think you’re an English gentleman and send you to London Zoo?”
Ping raised his eyebrows haughtily.
“London is so yesterday,” he scoffed.
“Meaning what?” she squeaked in frustration. “If you don’t tell me what you’re doing, I’ll tell Mommy you’re up to no good and she’ll make you confess.”
“Tell me what?” Their mother’s voice pierced the darkness like the snap of a twig.
“Nothing!” shouted Ping, kicking his sister for being so loud.
“Ow!” she yelped. “You’ll pay for that.”
“Go to sleep,” ordered Mao Mao. “It’s late.”
In the dark, Ping could hear An snickering.
“Now you’ll have to tell me,” she said. “Because if you don’t, I’ll scream and that will get Mommy out of bed, and I will tell her you kicked me and she will be so furious that you will be grounded for a year!”
Ping knew when he was beaten. Besides, if he drew his sister into the plan, maybe she could help.
“Right,” he said. “Here’s the deal. Tomorrow at lunchtime, I want you to lure all the rangers and visitors to the wooden bridge that crosses the River Trickle. If you do, I promise to share my secret with you. But until then, you mustn’t let on that something spectacular is going to happen.”
“Is it really going to be spectacular?” whispered An excitedly.
“A sight so rare that it has only ever been seen in Australia,” boasted Ping.
“Gosh!” his sister muttered in awe. “It sounds completely amazing.”
“It will be,” said Ping. “Now, can I borrow a skirt?”
The next day, Ping had until lunchtime to carry out the second part of his plan—to make the River Trickle roar! He left the enclosure before sunrise and climbed the mountain to the source of the river.
As the sun’s first rays sparkled across the water, Ping arrived in his chosen clearing, laid down his bamboo surfboard, and pulled on his sister’s skirt. It was her best party skirt, made from the finest grass, and it rustled when he wiggled his hips.
He had come out this early partly so that no other panda would see him wearing girls’ clothes, and partly to give his plan time to work. He was going to make it rain, and the rain was going to fill up th
e river—and a full river would provide the perfect conditions for surfing.
But first he had to perform a rain dance. Hui had once told him about people in faraway Papua, New Guinea, who wore ceremonial skirts, shoved bones through their noses, and danced beneath the clouds to make the rain fall. They sang a special rain song, apparently, which Hui had not been able to remember, so Ping decided to make something else up instead.
Not having a bone, he shoved a short length of bamboo between his teeth, then, hopping from paw to paw as if dancing on a seesaw, he gazed up at the sky, and in his politest voice, intoned the following ditty:
“Oh, weeping wet clouds
Up high in the sky,
Burst into tears and
Spit in my eye.
If we are best mates,
Release your floodgates.
Not spitters and spatters,
It’s monsoons that matter.”
The last line was rather poor, but Ping was starting to feel sick from jiggling up and down, and to be honest, he couldn’t think of anything better. He stopped to catch his breath and held out a paw to see if it was raining.
It wasn’t.
Then suddenly he remembered what Jack had said about it raining cats and dogs in England. Maybe that was what he was doing wrong.
“Here, kitty-kitty!” he shouted up at the clouds. “Come to Pingy!” And then in a slightly angrier voice—because that is what dogs respond to—he added, “Bad boy! Naughty boy! Come down out of that cloud NOW and fall into the river!”
Still nothing.
Ping was starting to become desperate. He improvised a dance by doing several forward somersaults and then running around in a figure eight, while making the sort of noises that he imagined cats and dogs would understand.
“Woof!” he barked. “Woof, woof, woof, woof! Meow, meow, woof, meow.”
But still nothing.
Wherever the cats and dogs might be lurking, it certainly wasn’t up in the clouds.
The only animals he did attract were the golden monkeys, who had rushed through the forest to see what all the noise was about, and finding Ping dancing around in his sister’s skirt, barking like a mad dog, they fell out of the trees with laughter.
“Haven’t you got anything better to do?” shouted Ping, his face reddening as the laughter grew louder.
“What could be better than this?” screeched Choo. “Watching you dance is much funnier than stealing cameras from tourists, taking pictures of our bottoms, then putting the cameras back in their pockets… And THAT is funny!”
Ping slunk away into the undergrowth to reassess his plan. It was now nine o’clock and he had wasted two hours trying to make it rain. If the surf was to be up by lunchtime, he needed to move fast. It was time for Plan B.
Beavers!
Now Ping knew that beavers would do anything for a cup of tea, so he offered them a steaming pot of the stuff if they’d build a dam across the River Trickle, let the water build up behind it, and then break the dam so that the water would gush down the mountainside in a tidal wave.
What Ping did not realize, however, was that along with the tea drinking, went the tea drinking ceremony, and the beavers were sticklers for detail. The beaver leader, a buck-toothed fellow named Fang, explained what was going to happen.
First, everyone had to sit in a circle and look at the tea leaves in the bottom of the teapot for half an hour before Ping was allowed to pour the boiling water over them. Then the tea had to infuse for the correct amount of time.
“An hour!” gasped Ping.
“For maximum flavor,” nodded Fang.
And finally there was the sniffing, which went on forever while the teapot was passed around and the heavenly tea-soaked steam was sniffed through the snout.
Ping was getting anxious. At one o’clock, if An had done her job, a crowd would be gathering on the wooden bridge, expecting to see something spectacular. And if Ping was to be chosen to go to Australia, instead of pretty-boy Gao, he needed to be cresting a wave on his surfboard and whooshing past at that precise moment.
It was now twelve o’clock, the tea had still not been drunk, and Ping had run out of time.
“Forget it!” he shouted, jumping to his feet in a panda panic. “It’ll have to be Plan C.”
Plan C was the third-best plan because Ping thought it stood the least chance of succeeding. Somehow, he had to convince the golden monkeys to help him—despite the fact that the golden monkeys were famous for never helping anyone and always doing the opposite of what they were asked to do.
Ping would have to think creatively.
Stopping briefly by an ants’ nest, Ping plunged his arm down the hole at the top and grabbed some ants. Then, ignoring the sharp pinpricks on the ends of his paws where the ants had started to bite him, he ran as fast as he could to the clearing where the monkeys had made fun of him earlier. They were still there, lounging on top of a big rock by the side of the river, asleep in the sunshine. Ping crept between the snoring bodies and sprinkled the ants around the base of the rock. Then he stepped back and coughed loudly.
The monkeys woke at once, their heads still foggy with sleep, and before they could properly come to their senses, Ping made an announcement.
“I thought you might like to know,” he said, with the air of someone who couldn’t care less, “that I think you’re sleeping on top of a nest of ants.”
That woke the monkeys up! They leaped off the rock and stuck their greedy faces to the ground, where the first thing they saw, of course, was a swarm of ants!
Ping knew enough about golden monkeys to understand that they would move heaven and earth to get at a nest of these deliciously crunchy insects. Only on this occasion, moving heaven and earth would not be necessary because all they had to move was a rock.
So while the monkeys heaved and strained to move the rock off the non-existent nest, Ping added the final cunning twist to his plan by casually reminding them that the rangers had expressly forbidden anyone to push rocks into the Trickle in case they should block the river.
Minutes later, of course, there was a large rock lying in the middle of the river, blocking the flow and causing the water to build up fast behind it. Ping had achieved the first stage of his goal with a magnificent lie—and still had five minutes to spare.
The only problem now was that with the rock rolled away, the monkeys could see there was no ants’ nest underneath.
“Maybe they’re hiding,” suggested Ping.
“How stupid do you think we are?” screeched Gang, the fiercest of the monkeys. “Millions of ants can’t just run away and hide!”
“Well, maybe they’ve packed their bags and gone away on vacation.”
“You lied to us,” growled Choo. “You made up the story about the ants’ nest to trick us into moving that rock.”
“Okay, I admit it; I’m sorry,” said the panda cub. “But whatever you do,” he added slyly, “when I stand on my surfboard on top of it in approximately five minutes’ time, you must NOT push the rock away, in case the water explodes down the mountain in a gigantic gush and takes me with it.”
Luckily, the golden monkeys knew nothing about the mechanics of surfing—and even less about the brilliantly devious mind of a certain panda cub named Ping!
And so it was that five minutes later, as Ping’s sister lured a crowd of rangers and tourists onto the wooden bridge by sitting on the other side and looking especially cute, the spectators heard a loud explosion on the mountain above them. It sounded like a giant swimming pool bursting, and was followed by a menacing rumble that grew louder and louder until suddenly, around the trees, a wall of white water swirled into view, with a screaming panda cub on a bamboo board balancing on top—although he wasn’t balancing. He was upside down, and left and right, and around and around, and flailing this way and that like a tumbling black-and-white sock in a washing machine. Clinging onto his surfboard for dear life, Ping swept past the astonished crowd, hit a submerged tree tru
nk, and took off.
“Heeeeeeeeeelp!” he wailed as he flew past a wide-eyed Hui with all the grace of a large penguin. “Tell my mother I love her!” And then, like the setting sun, he disappeared behind a bamboo hedge and hit the ground with a squelch.
When Ping woke up, he was back at the veterinarian’s office with a bandage wrapped around his head.
“What happened?” he asked weakly of the fuzzy faces that floated in and out of focus around his bed.
“You’ve had a bit of an accident,” said a voice that sounded like his mother’s.
“Is that why I feel like I’ve just swallowed a water buffalo?” Ping croaked. “Full of water.”
“It’s your own fault,” the voice continued. “You know what they say—A dry panda is a cuddly panda, but a wet panda is a fish.” It was definitely his mother.
“He’s leaking like a fish,” said his sister. “There’s water all over the floor.”
“You are a giant panda, Ping, not James Bond. Your life is not meant to be exciting. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in here permanently,” said Mao Mao.
“But did I do it?” he asked. “Did I surf the big one?”
“No,” said An flatly. “You fell down a large mountain on a tea tray. There was no skill involved at all.”
“Weren’t the rangers impressed?”
“The tall ranger was impressed by your surfboard when it dented his head,” snickered An.
“So I won’t be going to Australia then?”
“Was that what your secret was about?” she said disappointedly. “Trying to get yourself chosen by the rangers to go abroad again?”
Ping nodded his sore head.
“It was probably best I didn’t get chosen,” he muttered. “I don’t think I’m cut out for surfing.”
“Or flying,” added Hui, who had popped in through the open window to visit his friend. “I would have been here sooner, but I got held up at the office. The rangers wanted everyone to hang around while they praised Gao for his bravery.”