Читать книгу The Great Meerkat Adventure - Charles Norton - Страница 4

Our house was large and our garden long; it was the only home I had ever had and we were all happy living there. It was the middle house of three; on one side lived a big eagle owl and Mother always told us to keep away from him. On the other side lived a whole family of chimpanzees who played most of the day outside, but all went to bed at night in their house and then were very quiet indeed.

Our leader was called Mervin, and he was big, far bigger than anyone else, and he was the only meerkat to remember living somewhere else. He talked of being “free”, to which we said “yes”, but did not understand just what he meant. We had our family, our house, a large garden to play in and the humans kept us well fed… What could be better?

One day, after the humans had all gone away and there was nobody looking through our fence, Mervin called me and a few others to him, to “come to the fence and dig, we could get out and be free,” he said. It was teatime and we would have preferred to eat, but if he said dig, we had to dig.

Right next to the fence our little paws and claws dug down deep into the dirt until we came to the hard stuff. Grey, hard, stony stuff, and scratch as we might we could not get through it. Even Mervin, with his big claws, soon gave up and went in for tea.

Playing out one day soon after that I found a gap in the wire fence between us and the chimpanzees’ garden. Even though the hole was small I knew I could squeeze through if I wanted to. Now we had a way into next door’s garden, but when I told my brother, Mike, he said we must keep it a secret and shouldn’t tell Mervin.

Days later, Mike and I went out one night, stretched the wire, made a hole, and after looking for chimps, squeezed through it into the chimpanzees’ garden. We walked right across to the far side and could see fields and trees, but all around us was the smell of monkeys. We dug by their fence with our little paws in the cold night air, deeper and deeper, taking turns, one digging, one looking out for chimps or humans. Soon we had a tunnel under the fence; and up to the other side. We could get out now, perhaps that was where ‘free’ was?

We climbed out onto the grass and ran to some trees, found a stream of water and had a long drink. There was not a fence anywhere and we thought this is what Mervin must mean by ‘free’. We ran and rolled and ran again but we knew we had to go back home, and soon. We had gone so far we were nearly lost, but we found the tunnel and scampered back through. We filled it back in and padded it back down to cover our tracks. We tiptoed across the monkeys’ garden, through the wire and bent it back. It was our secret, nobody knew, and we promised ourselves we would go again sometime soon.