Читать книгу The Adventures of Bottersnikes and Gumbles - Desmond Digby - Страница 7

‘We’ll never let ourselves get caught by those creatures again,’ the Gumbles said, next morning. ‘Never, never, never, never!’

‘We’ll go away where they’ll never find us,’ Happigumble said. ‘One more paddle first, though.’

Someone suddenly cried, as they were paddling: ‘Where’s Willigumble? He’s not here!’

They called for him but there was no answer, and searched up and down the creek-bank but there was no sign; and after much anxious hunting they sat down and looked at each other glumly. No one said a word, but in each Gumblehead was the dreadful thought: Willigumble must have been left behind with the Bottersnikes. Little Willi, on his own. He was the smallest Gumble of them all.

Happigumble jumped up. ‘We’ll have to go and rescue him,’ he said. ‘Somehow.’

They started up the hill towards the rubbish heaps. Somehow they would get him back.

They had not gone far before a coloured thing came hurtling down the hill towards them. Faster and faster it came, off the road it bounced, sending them scattering, and lodged against a bush. It was an asparagus tin, with something inside that looked like a lump of dough — but when they pulled it out and squeezed it into shape, it was Willigumble. He was giggling all over.

‘Fatso of a Bottersnike couldn’t read,’ Willigumble gurgled. ‘Put me in the wrong tin!’

‘Silly old Willi, late as usual,’ the Gumbles joked. But there was great relief.

‘The Bottersnikes did kick up a rumpus when they found you’d all gone,’ Willigumble told them. ‘They turned the rubbish heaps upside down and all they found was the bottom of the jam tins; and then Owl told them about the tins rolling down the hill in the moonlight — disgusting, he called it, ’cos it scared the game — and the Bottersnikes told Owl not to be an idiot, it couldn’t happen, they said, and Owl told the Bottersnikes it could and did, and there was a fearful argument; and then the Bottersnikes said: “We’ll try it then, just to show what a fool Owl is,” and they took my tin across to the road and gave it a push — and here I am!’

‘And there are the Bottersnikes coming after us,’ cried Happigumble, ‘and O, grasshoppers, look at their ears! What are we going to do? Tinkingumble, have a tink quickly!’

Two or three of them squeezed Tinkingumble till he was nearly all head, because he had his best tinks that way; and meanwhile the Bottersnikes were waddling down the hill shouting furiously and blaming Owl for letting their last Gumble get away. Their ears were brilliant. In their horny hands they carried new jam tins.

The tink came in a moment, clear as a cricket’s chirrup, and the Gumbles crowded round. ‘What is it, Tinkingumble? What’s the tink?’

‘We must cross the creek,’ he said.

‘Yes, yes, but how? It’s too deep!’ For Gumbles, though they love to splash in shallow water, cannot swim.

‘In Willigumble’s tin, of course,’ he said. So they took Willigumble’s asparagus tin, the only one that didn’t have its bottom cut out, and using gum leaves as oars they paddled over in loads of four or five, with one oarsman bringing the tin back for the next trip.

The Bottersnikes arrived at the sandy beach just as the last tinful rowed away — and there they stopped. Bottersnikes hate water. If they get wet, they shrink, and have to be hung up to dry. So they stood on the bank and raged. Safe on the other side the Gumbles pulled rude faces, cheekily waved goodbye and scuttled into the bush.

The long ears glowed red hot with fury as the Bottersnikes howled and growled on the creek-bank, until at last the King roared ‘Snonk!’ and they became quieter.

The King said: ‘We will make a Gumbletrap.’

‘A trap to catch Gumbles in — oh, clever, clever!’ the Bottersnikes shouted. But what did a Gumbletrap look like? The King knew, perhaps, but he wouldn’t tell them, he just stood there tickling his stomach with the end of his tail.

A Bottersnike called Glob spoke up. ‘Suppose there was a hole in the ground and we covered it with branches so’s they couldn’t see it, then when they walked over it they’d all fall in.’

The King thought about this for two minutes and said: ‘Just what I was going to say myself. Dig the hole.’

This looked too much like work, so Glob said, a bit nervously: ‘Why don’t we get Smiggles to dream one?’

For very lazy people dreaming can be a way of getting things done, and this Bottersnike named Smiggles was useful sometimes because whatever he dreamed of became real — until he went to sleep again, then his first dream vanished to make room for his next. The trouble was that no one knew whether Smiggles would dream what he was told to dream about or something quite different.

‘Go to sleep, Smiggles,’ the King ordered, ‘and dream a hole. A big one.’

Smiggles went to sleep with no difficulty at all, and while they waited for the dream to come along the others pottered about looking for a bit of rubbish to make them feel at home. Presently two of these pottering Bottersnikes found an old weedy hole near the road that someone had dug ages ago, but they didn’t know this, they said: ‘Idiot, he’s dreamed it in the wrong place,’ and went and told the King.

‘Move it,’ the King said. ‘Put it down by the creek.’

Four Bottersnikes picked the hole up by the corners and staggered with it to the creek-bank, where they laid twigs and leaves over it so that it couldn’t be seen from the top. Also they threw a dead branch across the creek to make a bridge, and the hole was just by the end of the bridge so that as the Gumbles stepped off they would be sure to fall in.

‘A very cunning Gumbletrap,’ they boasted — and then Smiggles woke up. ‘Not a bad hole, Smig,’ they told him, ‘except it was in the wrong place.’

‘But I didn’t dream a hole,’ said Smiggles, puzzled. ‘I dreamed a radiogram.’ Which now stood awkwardly in the bush — an expensive model, with lots of knobs and polished wood, though under the circumstances, not much use.

The King looked at Smiggles’ dreamwork and snorted, then at the cunning Gumbletrap, but was not pleased with that either. ‘The Gumbles are too light,’ he growled. ‘They’ll walk over the twigs without falling in. The idiot what thought of this Gumbletrap ought to have his head sat on.’

Glob hurriedly suggested that they should all get into the hole — for they had to hide somewhere — and pull the Gumbles down as they came across. The Bottersnikes liked the idea of this. They squeezed in the hole together, covered up again with leaves and twigs, snuffled their noses loudly and had a bit of a sleep while they waited.

All this time the Gumbles had been playing with some frogs farther down the creek. When the sun began to get hot they came back for another paddle at their favourite beach — all except Willigumble, who had stopped to tell some young tadpoles that they couldn’t possibly play leapfrog until they had grown legs. The Gumbles were ever so cautious. On the far bank they stopped, looked and listened, wary for the merest whiff of danger; but no Bottersnikes could be seen; so they trotted over the bridge … and stepped carefully over the Gumbletrap, which failed to catch a single Gumble.

Gumbles are not so silly as to go crashing into covered holes — unless they go giggly, then they are silly enough for anything.

‘Funny about that hole covered with leaves. I’m sure it wasn’t there before,’ Happigumble remarked, and because it is difficult not to look into a hole, to see how deep it is, they moved the leaves and peeped in.

It was a most extraordinary sight. Water from the creek had seeped into the hole while the Bottersnikes were dozing, and the great, fat creatures who had squeezed to get in had shrunk to the merest of red-eared blobs — no bigger than Gumbles, in fact; and they were howling and clamouring to be let out, but naturally their voices had shrunk too.

The Gumbles went quite hopeless with giggling, at the sight.

‘Get us out of here!’ the Bottersnikes yelled in their ridiculous voices. ‘Can’t you see we’re drowning?’

Shakily, the Gumbles lowered branches, and helped them out. Face to face with the shrunk ’snikes they burst into giggles all over again. ‘You don’t look nearly as bad this size,’ they sniggered. ‘It’s a very good size to be, don’t you think?’

Unfortunately, Bottersnikes are objectionable whatever their size. They were not in the least grateful. All they said was: ‘If it hadn’t been for you Gumbles we’d never have got in that hole in the first place,’ and they found that although they were too small to grab the Gumbles properly they could pick the jam tins up and throw them over the Gumbles, making prisoners of them; this they did, shouting, ‘Got you!’ as usual, and then they sat hard on the tins and waited for the wind to dry them out, so that they would grow again.

That was how things were when Willigumble came along.

‘O, grasshoppers!’ said Willi. Now he would have to do the rescuing, on his own.

‘I wish I could have tinks,’ he said. But Tinkingumble was the only tinker.

The Bottersnikes thought they may as well make some noise while they were growing up, and they shouted at the radio to play a tune. No one was big enough to reach the knob to switch it on, however, and the King growled, in what was supposed to be his deepest woof but was really only a tweet: ‘Just like that idiot Smiggles. He don’t dream right and what he do dream don’t work.’

That gave Willigumble his big idea, though it did not come with a tink. He nipped over the bridge and, keeping out of sight, crept to the back of the radio. A moment later a piping, squeaky voice came out of it: ‘Hem! Exercises for small people, to make them bigger! Are you ready, everyone?’

‘Just what we want!’ said Smiggles, very pleased with his radio and himself.

The radio made them wriggle and bend, waggle their ears and tie knots in their tails, but the Bottersnikes did all their growing exercises sitting down and just would not get off the jam tins.

At last the radio said: ‘Now, you’ll have grown an inch! Stand up, everyone, and try to touch the sky with the tops of your heads, and see how much you’ve grown.’

This the Bottersnikes could not resist doing. As they stood up to see how much they’d grown the jam tins behind them tipped over and the prisoner Gumbles escaped silently to the bush.

‘Close your eyes, everyone!’ the radio said hurriedly, ‘and listen carefully. Here’s a brand new exercise that will make you grow two inches. Sit on the ground with your tails between your legs. Now put your feet behind your ears. Roll forward slowly until you can pick up the ends of your tails in your teeth —’

The Bottersnikes tried to do this complicated growing exercise and scorched their feet severely on their red-hot ears. The radio gave a snort and a giggle then, and went off the air for good. Little Willigumble crawled out from the valves and things and — late as usual — rushed off to find his friends.