I looked around.
Gum trees! Lovely tall, white-trunked gum trees! I had never been so happy to see a gum tree in my life! I was so happy I could have hugged one, but I didn’t because I’d have looked like a total dork in front of everyone.
The river had gone, and the rippling lake too, and every one of those dismal-looking trees (I didn’t think I’d ever feel really friendly about Christmas trees again). And there was
grass
! Sort of tufty, not really lawn-type grass, and I bet it had never seen a lawn mower. But it still looked just like the bush-type grass you’d expect a Big Koala Wildlife Park to have.
‘Home!’ I yelled. ‘You did it! Phredde, Bruce, you did it!’
‘It was nothing,’ said Bruce modestly.
‘Yes it was,’ said Phredde. ‘I’ve never worked so hard at a PING in all my life!’
‘Never mind,’ I said ‘We’re back! Let’s find the others! And the kiosk and the souvenir stall.’
‘We might even see a koala,’ said Mrs Olsen hopefully. She looked around. ‘Which way should we go?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Miss Richards. ‘How about we just jump on the carpet and fly in a circle? That way we’re sure to come to the entrance of the park somewhere.’
‘A
slow
circle,’ Mrs Olsen added to Phredde. ‘We don’t want to accidentally zap back into the past again.’
Nothing much makes Phredde embarrassed, but she did look a bit pink then. ‘I don’t have enough magic left to PING us anywhere, remember?’ she said. ‘Look, I am sorry about taking us into the past. I mean, I didn’t mean to…’
I stared. I’d never heard Phredde sound so apologetic before.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It was kind of interesting.’
‘And the prehistoric beetles were delicious,’ said Bruce.
‘I’m sure it was very educational for us all,’ said Mrs Olsen firmly.
‘I never thought I’d get to practise my karate on a rhoetosaurus,’ added Miss Richards.
Suddenly a rumbling broke the tree-and-breeze-type silence around us. For a second I thought it might be another rhoetosaurus galloping towards us, but then I remembered I didn’t have to worry about rhoetosauruses any more. We were home—well, at the Big Koala Park anyway.
And the noise was just my tummy rumbling.
‘Let’s get going!’ I said. I didn’t add, let’s find the kiosk and get a triple-decker hamburger with extra beetroot and a banana milkshake, but that’s what I was thinking.
So we climbed aboard the flying carpet again. It was a bit of a squash with five of us—Phredde can normally perch on my shoulder, but flying carpets get a bit breezy and she might have blown off, especially without any magic to divert the wind. So I was squashed between Miss Richards and Bruce, which made me kind of wish he’d change back into a phaery prince, ’cause frogs are sort of squishy to squash up to. If we ever started
seriously
going out, I decided, I’d have to ask him to magic himself into human, er, phaery form, but maybe
big
phaery form—maybe he could fix it so I was the only one who saw him like that too.
‘Last one to see a koala is a snot bucket!’ yelled Phredde happily, as the carpet rose above the tufty grass and began to zoom forwards. It was a sort of sedate zoom though, without Phredde’s magic behind it.
It’s kind of fun flying a magic carpet through the trees, especially when you don’t have to worry about a rhoetosaurus bobbing out at you. In fact, I decided that riding a flying carpet was the best way ever to go through a Big Koala Park.
‘Hey, there’s a koala!’ yelled Bruce, pointing to the branch of a gum tree.
Phredde snorted. ‘Koalas don’t have tails, dumb dumb.’
‘Manners, Ethereal,’ said Mrs Olsen warningly.
‘Sorry,’ said Phredde, not sounding sorry at all. ‘But look at it! That’s not a koala! It’s got a long furry tail and a great big nose.’
‘It’s a possum,’ I said.
Miss Richards flicked open the laptop so it stuck into my back. ‘Actually I think it’s a tree kangaroo,’ she
said. ‘How interesting! You only find them up in North Queensland these days.’
‘These days?’ I asked.
‘Well, according to this they may have once lived all over Australia.’ She peered at the tree kangaroo. At least it was doing what koalas do during the day. In other words, nothing much at all. In fact it was asleep. ‘I always thought that tree kangaroos were much smaller than that. This must be an extra large specimen.’
‘I think it’s great how you know so much,’ said Bruce admiringly. A bit too admiringly, I thought.
‘It’s just a matter of knowing how to look up the information,’ said Miss Richards. ‘You know, you should think about being a library monitor, Bruce, like Prudence and Ethereal. Any time you want to---’
‘Hey,
there’s
some kangaroos!’ I yelled, glad to have an excuse to interrupt the conversation. Bruce was starting to sound just a bit too keen on Miss Richards.
‘They’re pretty weird-looking kangaroos,’ said Phredde dubiously. ‘Their faces look all flat.’
‘Maybe someone bashed them on the nose,’ suggested Bruce.
‘Huh!’ said Phredde. ‘Who’d bash a whole mob of ’roos on their noses?’
‘Well, some people are pretty sick,’ argued Bruce. ‘I mean, they hurt things just for fun.’
‘You know, I’m getting just a little concerned,’ interrupted Mrs Olsen worriedly. ‘We’ve been flying for ten minutes now and there’s no sign of the park gate
or
the buses.’
‘
Or
the kiosk,’ I added.
‘
Or
any koalas,’ put in Phredde. ‘How anyone—any
frog
can think a tree kangaroo is a koala…’
‘Maybe…just maybe…we haven’t got all the way back to the present. I mean the future…’ said Mrs Olsen. ‘I don’t want to worry anyone, but I think that possibly---’
‘Hey! There’s a koala!’ I yelled. Then I stopped. ‘Oops, no it isn’t. Koalas don’t have tails.’ ‘Or spots,’ said Phredde.
‘Or giant fangs,’ added Bruce slowly, just as the ‘koala’ leapt off its branch onto the back of one of the flat-faced kangaroos.
The kangaroo gave a high shrill scream. The other ’roos stared, then bounded off through the scattered trees.
‘Cowards!’ yelled Phredde. ‘Why don’t you stay and help your friend?’
The bounding ’roos took no notice.
‘We’ve got to save that kangaroo!’ I screamed. ‘Phredde, lower the carpet!’
‘No!’ shrieked Mrs Olsen. ‘It’s too dangerous! What would your parents say if I brought you back from a school excursion all ripped up by a…a…’
‘A spotted marsupial lion or leopard!’ announced Miss Richards behind me, as the laptop dug into my ribs again. ‘
Thylacoleo carnifex.
They roamed most of Australia except the arid centre from about one million years ago almost till modern times. It had…or has…powerful jaws to crush its prey…’
‘I can see that,’ I said shakily. The leopard’s jaws were round the ’roo’s neck now, as its claws dug into the ’roo’s head and chest.
‘And knife-like teeth to rip the flesh apart.’
‘Uh, yuk,’ said Phredde.
I shut my eyes. Mrs Olsen was right. There was
nothing we could do. But at least we didn’t have to watch it.
‘Hey, cool,’ said Bruce. He considered. ‘It looks more like a leopard to me.’
‘Shut up, Bruce,’ I said crossly. Boys! And that goes for frogs too, I thought.
I opened my eyes squeamishly. The ’roo was on the ground and the lion—or leopard—was having breakfast…lunch…afternoon tea…
‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said urgently.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Olsen from the front of the carpet. She was looking a bit strange. Maybe she was just hungry, I thought. After all, she hadn’t had any lunch and all that bl…, er, red stuff, must have got her tummy rumbling too.
Great, I thought. Trapped in the past on a flying carpet with a hungry vampire and my boyfriend—well, okay he’s not a boy and not
exactly
a boyfriend either but you know what I mean—sucking up to our librarian
and
my best friend who has lost her PING.
Mrs Olsen gazed a bit wistfully at the bl…, er, red stuff on the knife-like teeth of the leopard. ‘We should just travel a bit further. Just…just to make sure we’re not in the twenty-first century,’ she said.
Well, it seemed pretty obvious to me, but Phredde zoomed the carpet off. And we kept looking for signs of civilisation, like take-away pizzas and traffic jams and electric power poles.
There wasn’t a single pizza joint to be seen. Instead we saw trees, lots and lots of gum trees, all pretty straggly looking, and what Miss Richards said were casuarinas but looked more like shaggy upside-down brooms with such bad dandruff they were going bald. The ground began to rise and the trees got shorter and
stockier till they finally disappeared and the brown rocky gullies trickled with sad little seeps of water till finally there was no water at all, just…
‘Ice…’ whispered Phredde.
‘A glacier,’ corrected Miss Richards.
Actually, the glacier looked pretty cool.
13
It was more blue than white and stretched right up the hill onto a mountain which was all blue-white too. Blobs of white snow broke up the blueness and a cold, dry wind gusted down onto our faces.
‘You know,’ said Mrs Olsen slowly, ‘I am almost sure there isn’t a glacier at the Big Koala Wildlife Park. In fact, there hasn’t been one in Australia for over tens of thousands of years…’
‘We haven’t seen any signs of smoke either,’ added Miss Olsen.
‘No barbecues?’ I said.
‘No Aboriginal inhabitants,’ corrected Miss Richards. ‘So we are probably over 100,000 years in the past, before humans came here.’
‘Oh,’ I said. The glacier was really spectacular (and noisy too—it sort of cracked and groaned). But I was in no mood to appreciate the glories and wonders of nature. (Yuk. Amelia used that phrase in her last science essay. Doesn’t it make you
sick
?)
And a glacier was no place to spend the day—or the night. As Miss Richards said, we had to find a suitable campsite and rig up some sort of shelter before it got dark and even colder—seeing we could be here for a while.
So Phredde turned the carpet around and we zoomed despondently back to the lowlands. The trickle of icy water from the glacier became a creek again, then the creek became a river—a pretty shallow river, twisting and winding its way through the hills. Then the river grew straighter and the ground got flatter, and as we landed on the grassy riverbank I tried to be thankful that at least it
was
grass, not moss or ferns or mud, but it didn’t help much.
I was cold and hungry and I wanted my mum and my dad and my own little bed in my own little castle—well, actually it’s a great big bed made out of rose petals and our castle is pretty enormous but it sounds better if you say they’re little. It made me sound more sad and lonely somehow, which I was, even if I had my two best friends with me plus our teacher and a librarian and her laptop.
‘Well, everyone,’ Mrs Olsen was trying to sound brisk and cheerful, ‘the first thing we need to do is build a shelter for tonight, just in case it rains.’
‘Out of what?’ asked Bruce.
‘Out of…er, palm fronds,’ suggested Mrs Olsen.
Bruce shook his froggy head. ‘There aren’t any palms. Just gum trees. I don’t think gum-tree branches will keep the rain out. And we don’t have an axe or anything to cut them down with.’
‘How about we find a cave again?’ I suggested.
Miss Richards shook her head. She had her laptop open again. ‘It might take us days to find a cave. We were lucky last time. Besides, this isn’t limestone country now and that’s where you find caves. No, I think what we need to do is build a wattle-and-daub hut.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Miss Richards suddenly got a bright gleam in her eyes. ‘See those dark-trunked trees? They’re wattles, or acacias. But even young gum trees will do,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘You just snap off the young trees, so we won’t need an axe, and we can strip bark off the larger trees for the roof.’
‘Wow, Miss Richards. You are
cool
,’ said Bruce. ‘Huh,’ I said, and began to look for baby gum trees.
Well, I hate to say it, but it worked. Sort of, anyway. Just in case you’re ever trapped in the bush without an axe or a fully operational flying carpet to get you back to civilisation—or a speeding phaery has landed you well in the past—all you need to do is break off a few hundred baby trees.
First of all, you choose a flattish spot well up the hill from the river, in case it decides to flood during the night and take you with it.
Then you choose five big trees that are sort of growing in the right place for four corners with one extra tree near one of the corners because that holds the door. Then you pile the baby trees one on top of another to make the four walls, splodging them thickly with wet clay from the riverbank mixed with dead grass and stuff (which makes a real mess) so they don’t fall over and to fill up the cracks. And make sure you leave the door bit open or you’ll have to use your flying carpet to get in and out through the roof.
Which brings me to the roof bit: because mud washes away in the rain, the roof needs to go right out over the walls to protect them. When your walls are higher than you are—which is pretty short if you’re a phaery but pretty high if you’re a librarian—you put
lots more baby trees across the four walls for some beams, then lay strips of bark across them.
Don’t try to get the bark off the trees with your fingernails or you won’t have any fingernails. Just hope you have a librarian around who’ll find a few sharp stones or jagged bones to use like knives, but once you slice into the bark it peels off the tree really easily. (Except it has to be the right sort of thick bark, and don’t take more than one strip from any one tree because you’ll kill the tree.)
And
finally
you’ve got a hut that will keep out the wind and the rain and spotty leopards—you hope, anyway.
We were all pretty proud when we’d finished. Even if it wasn’t a castle it was still a pretty good effort for a kid, a phaery, a frog, a teacher and a know-all librarian.
We were also muddy, hungry and very, very tired.
Phredde glanced up at the sun, which was still plodding across the sky. ‘This day has gone on forever,’ she said.