It was like those days back in the library when we were in kindergarten, all of us crowded round the librarian while she read us a nice story. A bit like it anyway. Well, okay, it wasn’t like it at all.
Instead of a nice school library with carpet on the floor and posters and kids’ artwork all round the place and a nice school tuckshop just outside and pizza bars down the road, we sat on our stone seats 100,000 years ago with a mud hut behind us while Miss Richards read to us from the computer screen. ‘The Demon Duck of Doom was two metres high,’ she read.
‘Sounds about right,’ muttered Bruce.
‘And weighed about 300 kilograms.’
‘Who the heck is going to haul one of those onto the scales and weigh it!’ whispered Phredde.
‘These gigantic flightless birds…’
(I sighed in relief. The thought of one of those flying
over
us was a bit…well, terrifying…)
‘…roamed Australia from 25 million to about 30,000 years ago, or even as late as 6000 years ago. They were one of the biggest birds that ever lived.’
‘Oh, goodie,’ muttered Phredde. ‘At least there isn’t a bigger one around.’
‘There is considerable discussion, however, about what they ate. Some authorities believe they were grass eaters, others that they preferred fruit, while some believe they were carnivores either killing their prey or scavenging dead meat that other beasts had killed.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’ve answered that question. Ducks of Doom like barbecued, flat-faced ’roo carcasses. And they don’t like leopards.’
I peered down at the body of the leopard. It hadn’t moved. Somehow I suspected that it’d never move again. Not under its own steam, anyway.
‘Poor pussy cat,’ I whispered.
‘Poor pussy cat!’ cried Phredde. ‘That pussy cat was going to eat you for breakfast. And it wasn’t even going to barbecue you first!’
‘Well, yeah, I know,’ I said. ‘But even leopards have to live. And we did steal its dinner.’
Phredde snorted. ‘You are
much
too soft-hearted,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ said Bruce. But he said it pretty nicely.
Miss Richards closed down the laptop to save its batteries and looked speculatively at the spotty leopard. ‘That fur coat really is very pretty,’ she said. ‘I wonder…It’s pretty simple to tan skins you know. You just scrape off all the membrane.’
‘Yuk,’ I said.
‘Then soak it in water that you’ve boiled wattle bark in…’
‘Double yuk.’
‘Then peg it out so it doesn’t dry out of shape and rub oil into it every day to keep it supple. But a really quick way is just to rub brains into the skin after you’ve scraped the fat off…’
‘REALLY, REALLY yuk!’
‘And then dry it over a smoky fire.’ She looked down at her tattered blouse and skirt. ‘It’s worth a try…’
After that, Phredde and Bruce and I built up the fire again. (‘Better keep it going this time,’ muttered Phredde, ‘in case we run out of matches.’) Then we cooked the fish by holding them over the flames on green branches, just like Miss Richards told us to. The scales sort of singed off that way—well, most of them, anyway. We were too hungry to care.
As a matter of fact, freshly caught fish cooked over an open fire tastes about a zillion times better than even a sausage and pineapple pizza with extra cheese, and it wasn’t just because we were hungry. I ate four fish and they were
big
ones and even Phredde ate a whole one herself, which was really something when you think it was nearly as big as she was. (Sometimes I think phaeries have magic stomachs. They can eat almost as much as we can.)
Miss Richards ate some fish too, but in an absent-minded sort of way, because she kept looking at the leopard skin and muttering, ‘Now, if I just cut there…and sew there…’
‘Should we save any fish for Mrs Olsen?’ asked Phredde, glancing towards the hut.
I shook my head. ‘Let her sleep,’ I said. ‘Anyway,
vampires don’t eat fish.’ Not when they have the entire prehistoric world to vampirise, I thought. But I didn’t say it.
After breakfast we sat around the remains of the fire and plotted.
‘The first thing we need to do,’ I said, ‘is work out how to get home. Don’t you think so, Miss Richards?’
‘Mmm?’ said Miss Richards. ‘Sorry, Prudence. I was just thinking that if I could chip a hole in a long, thin bit of bone I could use it as a needle to sew with. And animal sinew would be an excellent substitute for cotton thread…’
‘Well, how
can
we get home?’ said Phredde practically. ‘I can’t PING us back and neither can Bruce.’
‘Then we’re stuck here till you get your next magic allowance on Saturday,’ I said gloomily. ‘A whole five more days in the past!’
Phredde looked at Bruce and Bruce looked at Phredde.
‘Um,’ said Bruce, ‘I thought you would have realised. How can our parents give us our magic allowance if we’re back here?’
My heart did a flip-flop and sank through my tummy. ‘You mean we’re stuck here? For good?’
‘Maybe our parents will find us,’ said Phredde hopefully. ‘They can PING back here and…’
‘
If
they can find us,’ said Bruce gloomily. ‘They don’t even know we’re back in the past! They might just think we’ve gone to Phaeryland…and even if they think of looking back here, there’s an awful lot of past to search. It’d take forever—even with magic.’
‘Oh,’ I said. My heart was somewhere down near my toes by now. I tried to think what to suggest next.
I mean in any normal adventure story the kids would work out a way of travelling through the jungle or desert, or stealing a spaceship, to get home. But no matter how far
we
travelled we’d still be in the past.
‘I don’t suppose there’re plans for a time machine on your laptop?’ I asked Miss Richards hopefully.
‘What did you say, Prudence? I really should start getting the skin off that leopard if it’s going to be any use at all. No, I don’t have plans for a time machine. No-one does…I did see a diagram for an excellent animal trap though. You dig a pit and cover it with branches then chase the animals over it…I wonder if…’
Well, we weren’t coming up with a plan to get home, and Miss Richards seemed pretty preoccupied. So (just in case riding the carpet so soon after breakfast made me carpet sick) we went for a walk instead.
It was an okay walk. I mean, my favourite sort of bushwalk is down a nice smooth footpath with an ice-cream shop at the end of it with one hundred and fifty flavours of ice-cream including passionfruit and banana (my favourite)
and
super-size banana splits with chocolate sauce and something fizzy in a paper cup.
But no-one was going to invent ice-cream for 98,000 years
16
(Phredde and I did a project on the history of ice-cream last term).
We wandered down through the trees to the riverbank and gazed down through the clear water at Miss Richards’s fish traps. (There were fish in them already.) A few big birds flapped lazily along the shallows when they saw us, but neither Phredde nor Bruce nor I knew enough about big flapping birds to know if they were normal-type flapping birds or prehistoric ones.
We splashed our faces in the water to get rid of any remains of breakfast, then mooched along the riverbank. We didn’t talk much. I think all three of us were thinking about our parents—I was even missing Mark and
really
worrying how he was coping without me to fix things between him and Tracey—and our homes. I was even missing school and
that’ll
tell you how homesick I was.
But the walk was okay. A cool, dry breeze blew in our faces (sometimes it had a funny smell too, a bit like the water in the river) and the riverbank was pretty smooth and grassy mostly (Bruce said he thought the river must flood sometimes and that kept the banks clear), with lots of pretty white flat flowers, like some dopey flower girl had danced in front of us scattering them all over the place. Here and there were more of the droopy Christmas-tree-like things, their roots half in the bank and half in the water, and sometimes little creeks with big dark-green trees and ferns in their gullies meandered down to meet the river.
Like I said, it was pretty good, but we didn’t find an ice-cream shop. All we did find was…
‘Someone’s compost heap!’ said Phredde, winging her way just above my right shoulder. ‘Look!’ She pointed up one of the little gullies. She was right—there under one of the tall really dark-green trees was what looked like someone’s lawn clippings and autumn leaves all raked up and left in a big neat pile.
Bruce stopped hopping and stared. ‘That’s impossible!’ he said. ‘We’re the only people here!’
‘Well, someone must have made it,’ said Phredde practically.
‘Or some
thing
,’ I said. I walked up to the pile and prodded it with my toe. Faint ripples of warm air were rising from it. Something jiggled in my memory. We’d read about
something
like this last term…
‘Hey, I know what it is!’ I exclaimed.
‘What?’ asked Phredde.
‘It’s a brush turkey’s nest! They lay their eggs on the ground but instead of having to sit on them for weeks to keep the eggs warm while they hatch, they scrape up all this dead grass and leaves and muck over the eggs. All the leaf muck heats up as it starts to rot and that keeps the eggs warm while the parents are off doing other stuff.’
‘Really?’ Phredde didn’t sound very interested and Bruce was darting his head this way and that searching for gnats in the gully.
‘Don’t you see what this means?’ I cried.
‘Nope,’ said Phredde. She fluttered over the compost heap and peered down at it.
‘Eggs for lunch!’ I yelled triumphantly. I shoved some of the leaves away and, sure enough, there was a pile of great big eggs, just sitting there. So there, Miss Richards, I thought. I can find bush tucker too!
I glanced over at Bruce to see if he appreciated it, but he was zotting a few beetles crawling up the tree.
Phredde wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t like eggs much,’ she said, ‘except for egg and lettuce sandwiches and we don’t have any lettuce. Or bread. Or margarine or pepper or…’
‘Well, they’ll make a change from barbecued flat-faced ’roo and fish!’ I said, exasperated. ‘And I like eggs anyway!’ I looked round for something to carry them in, but carry bags don’t grow on trees—not without
genetic engineering anyway—and Miss Richards’s bark carry bag was back at camp. I was just loading a few eggs into my tracksuit top (they were too big to carry all of them) when Phredde coughed behind me. ‘Um…Pru…’
‘Look,’ I said without turning round. ‘I know you don’t like eggs, but Mum is always going on about how we need a varied diet, and eggs are really good for---’
‘Pru!’ interrupted Phredde urgently. ‘I think you need to put those eggs down NOW!’
‘But I told you, I like---’
‘Pru!’ croaked Bruce. ‘Back off!’
I looked round, just as a goanna plodded down the gully, its beady eyes fixed on my eggs.
Goannas are cute, right? About as long as your arm, like a dragon that’s been shrunk in the wash. Well, this goanna was
sort
of like that.
Long, flat head. Long, fat tail and stumpy legs. But this goanna was…
‘It’s enormous!’ I breathed.
‘Yes!’ hissed Phredde, as the minibus-sized goanna thudded towards me. ‘And I think it wants those eggs! So let it have them!’
Mum is always saying I need to control my temper. I suppose she’s right but sometimes anger just gurgles up inside me like lava in one of those volcanoes I was keeping an eye out for. And I feel I have to let it out or I’ll explode and there’ll be bits of Prudence floating all over the place.
This was one of those times. One fruitcake monster after another had attacked us and we’d run away or PINGed ourselves out of trouble—AND I WAS SICK OF IT!
I took a step towards the goanna. ‘Look, buster,’ I yelled, ‘these are my eggs! I fruitcake well found them first! And if you don’t like it you can lump it!’
‘Hiss,’ said the goanna, casually sending a boulder or two crashing down the gully with its big stumpy feet. Luckily they missed us.
‘Pru!’ shrieked Phredde. ‘Leave it! We don’t want the fruitcake eggs!’
‘I don’t care!’ I screamed. ‘Look, mate,’ I yelled at the goanna, ‘I’m human! Get it! Humans rule the world! Well, we’re going to in 100,000 years’ time! And giant goannas are going to be extinct, which means I’m a zillion times smarter than you. Just because you’re bigger than me doesn’t mean you’re better, because humans are going to…’
‘Hiss,’ said the goanna calmly.
All at once I began to think that maybe bigger was quite an advantage, no matter how smart we humans were. In fact if I’d been
really
smart I’d have backed off more than two paragraphs ago…
‘Er,’ I said, ‘maybe I should apologise.’
Like Bruce said, animals back in prehistoric times don’t speak English. The goanna didn’t seem to recognise an apology at all.
‘Hiss,’ it said again. I could smell its breath now. Giant goannas don’t use toothbrushes
or
floss their teeth—in fact dental hygiene hadn’t improved noticeably since the Triassic. And giant goannas do have teeth—two sharp rows of them like big fat needles with little bits of decayed gunk in the gaps…I suddenly wondered if giant goannas liked eating Prudences as well as eggs.
I backed off slowly…slowly, slowly. For a moment I thought I was going to get away with it when
suddenly
whump,
I tripped over a rock and went bumdown onto the damp dirt of the gully.
The goanna loomed closer…closer, closer…All at once it bent its head and began gulping down the giant eggs like me and Phredde and Bruce didn’t exist.
I pushed myself backwards on my sit-upon till I was well clear of the goanna and stood up. My bottom hurt and I bet it was all muddy too, and the eggs in my tracksuit top had smashed or rolled back into goanna reach. There was only one still whole. I supposed it had landed in something soft. I picked it up absent-mindedly and we backed off even further till we were well away from the gully and back on the riverbank. Through the trees we could still hear ‘Glop! Glop! Glop!’ as the goanna guzzled down the massive eggs.
‘Those were
my
eggs,’ I muttered.
‘Actually,’ said Phredde, ‘they were the brush turkey’s eggs.’
‘Well, the brush turkey shouldn’t have left them!’ I said. ‘I found them! That fruitcake goanna had no right to…’
Bruce sighed. ‘Look, are you going to go back and attack a seven-metre goanna with your bare hands or will we go back to camp and have some lunch?’
Well, put like that I realised I didn’t really want to risk becoming little bits of decayed gunk between a prehistoric goanna’s stinky teeth. And food did sound pretty good, and I didn’t really like eggs all
that
much and, anyway, I still had one.
‘Okay, lunch,’ I said.
I looked down at my egg. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen—more like a small football than an egg—
and sort of leathery too. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘this egg is probably big enough for all of us.’
‘I wonder if Mrs Olsen has woken up yet?’ said Phredde.
I thought she probably hadn’t—not after vampirising a whole herd of flat-faced ’roos. I also wondered what would happen if Mrs Olsen went totally feral and vampire-like. But there was no point mentioning that to the others.
So we wandered back along the riverbank, and I kept my egg cuddled close in case another giant goanna saw it and tried to make off with it. We got back to the fish traps without anything interesting happening at all—well, apart from seeing an echidna the size of our school garbage bins digging up the leaves under the dark trees in a gully and a sort of furry rhinoceros tearing down tree branches and chomping them up. But at least no monstrous beast tried to eat us, which made a nice change.
We stopped at the fish traps. My hands were full of giant egg, but Phredde and Bruce hauled the traps up. There were more fish than we could eat, even if Mrs Olsen woke up and decided she was a fish eater instead of a vampire and, to be honest, I was pretty sick of fish already. So we tossed most of them back and hoped they had enough brains not to swim into any more fish traps.
The camp looked…different…when we got back.
First of all someone—Miss Richards I supposed—had strung long lines of vine between the trees. These were hung with long balloon-like things filled with grass, and five great big animal skins flapped in the dry breeze too.
Even the fire looked different. Miss Richards had surrounded it with even more neatly piled up stones, and on the stones rested a giant-turtle shell filled with stew, steaming gently by the coals.
It smelt pretty good too. But there was no sign of Miss Richards.
‘You don’t suppose a leopard has eaten her?’ whispered Phredde. ‘Or a giant goanna or a furry rhinoceros or a…’
‘Is that you?’ The big untrimmed furry skin that now hung in the hut doorway was pushed back, and there was Miss Richards. Well, it looked a
bit
like Miss Richards, anyway.
‘Wow!’ said Bruce.
The neat blue skirt was gone
and
the sensible white blouse. In their place Miss Richards had sort of twined the leopard skin around her.
Tight
around her.
‘That is so cool!’ said Bruce. His mouth hung open.
I glared at him.
‘I…er…mean the short skirt will keep her cool,’ added Bruce hurriedly.
As well as the leopard skin Miss Richards wore a necklace of spiky fish bones. She’d put a flower in her hair too. Only her shoes were the same. She strode over to us.
‘Er, you’ve been busy,’ I said weakly.
Miss Richards grinned. Somehow she looked happier than she’d ever looked in the library back home. ‘I decided to use the flying carpet,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!’ She nodded over at the skins on the line. ‘I managed to find quite a few fairly fresh leopard kills. The skins are hardly chewed at all. They’ll make great blankets.’
‘What are those balloons?’ I asked guardedly.
‘Oh, those are animal guts. You rinse them out and stuff them with grass and when they dry out we can store roots and berries and other things in them. And I found the old turtle shells a few gullies away. We can use one as a big cooking pot and use the other to heat water to have hot baths in as soon as I make some soap. We don’t want to pollute the river with soap suds.’
We nodded silently, our eyes wide. I half expected her to add that she’d invented a flush toilet too, but she didn’t, so I supposed I’d have to keep using the bushes and big soft leaves where I
hoped
no-one was going to walk.
‘What’s in the turtle shell now?’ asked Phredde. She almost looked like she was drooling. Well, it
was
going to be our first decent meal apart from barbecued ’roo and fish in about 144 million years.
‘Just some wallaby meat I caught in my pit trap,’ said Miss Richards airily. ‘It looked like a nice tender wallaby. Then I dug up some yam daisy roots—they’re a bit like a sweet potato, but nuttier—and I found some bush tomatoes too, and some wild plantain leaves. The stew should taste quite good.’ She finally noticed I was carrying something. ‘What’s that Prudence?’
‘An egg,’ I said. ‘I thought we could have it for lunch.’
It sounded a bit silly saying that now, what with the stew bubbling in the turtle shell
and
all the fish
and
I could see there was even a little pile of oval-shaped orange and purple berries
17
for dessert in a long bark bowl neatly tied at the end with a plait of dried grass.
‘What a good idea, Prudence,’ said Miss Richards kindly. ‘I’m sure it will be very nice.’
‘I’d rather have stew,’ said Bruce eagerly.
Phredde kicked him discreetly in the ribs. ‘You’ll eat Pru’s egg and like it!’ she hissed.
‘But…’ began Bruce. Then he saw my face. ‘Um, yes, a bit of egg would be delicious,’ he said.
I nodded miserably.
In the end, though, everyone forgot about my egg. Except me of course. I put it down near the fire and we sat on our stone seats with the stringybark cushions and drank our stew from paperbark bowls that Miss Richards said had taken no time at all to make and picked the lumps of meat and veg out and ate them with our fingers. (I remembered my plastic spoon in my school bag in the hut, but it seemed a pity to disturb Mrs Olsen and, anyway, one plastic spoon wasn’t much use with the four of us.)