The Phredde Collection (38 page)

Miss Richards nodded. ‘I think we must have arrived in this time early in the morning,’ she said. ‘It’s taken us at least six hours to build the hut.’

Six hours! My tummy rumbled in sympathy.

‘I need food!’ I said.

Miss Richards nodded. She’d been consulting her laptop all day and had more or less taken over as leader. ‘There’s food all around us!’ she said.

‘There is?’ I peered round: nope, no pizzas swinging from the trees, no hamburgers growing on the bushes. Not even a cheese and tomato sandwich with beetroot and pickled cucumbers on one of the rocks.

‘See?’ said Miss Richards. ‘That green stuff by the
edge of the river is watercress. Of course, it’s a bit muddy at the moment but you can swim out to the middle of the river and wash it clean. There’s plenty there for all of us.’

‘Oh yummy,’ I muttered.

‘And those are kurrajong fruits. My notes say they’re a bit tasteless but they’re full of vitamins. If we dig up the roots, too, we can roast them on the fire like potatoes. Of course they’ll be a bit tough…’

Roots…green stuff…

‘I’d rather have a sausage and pineapple pizza with olives and sundried tomatoes,’ I said.

‘I think I’ll stick to mosquitoes,’ said Bruce. ‘There’s sure to be some when it starts to get dark.’

‘I never touch green stuff,’ said Mrs Olsen.

Phredde just said, ‘Errk.’

‘Oh,’ said Miss Richards. She thought for a moment. ‘Well, we could fly back to the spot where we saw the leopard. It may have left enough of the kangaroo—they’re called procoptodons, if anyone is interested (I wasn’t), and see if there’s enough meat left for a barbecue.’

Well, leftover leopard-chewed procoptodon wasn’t sausage and pineapple pizza, or even a chicken kebab with tabouli and sliced onions and lots of garlic sauce. But it was better than weeds and dry-looking berries.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Barbecue it is.’

Mrs Olsen sort of sighed. She had this really hungry look. Normally you can hardly see her fangs at all, but now they were sticking out more than ever.

Phredde and I flew off on the carpet to get the meat, while the others built up a big fire by our hut and Miss Richards started weaving a basket out of stringybark to
collect berries in. She’d seen some wild raspberry bushes while we were coming back from the glacier, she said, but we really did need a basket to carry them in.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Bruce helpfully. I noticed he didn’t offer to help us bring back the meat.

The leopard had eaten most of one haunch of the flat-faced ’roo (the haunch is all that meat just up from the leg) but there was still plenty left for us. We looked round carefully in case the leopard was guarding its leftovers, but it must have slunk off somewhere for a drink or something, because there were no savage-looking animals around.

Phredde kept the carpet hovering a few centimetres off the ground while I hauled the carcass aboard. The carpet was looking a bit the worse for wear by now. It looked even grottier with a big slab of dead kangaroo on it.

The fire was burning brightly when we got back, which was a good thing as it was finally starting to get dark. About a zillion stars were bursting out all over the sky, a million times brighter than in our time—I suppose because there wasn’t any smog to tarnish them.

‘And no bright lights either,’ said Miss Richards. She’d stuck four sticks in the ground and had built a sort of table from fallen dead branches all tied together with vine on top of them, and she’d got Bruce to haul over great armloads of bracken and pile them up in the hut for our beds too, so we didn’t have to sleep on the bare ground.

Now she was busy with a big round rock, grinding up kurrajong tree roots into a sort of paste. ‘Bright lights really drain all the colour from the stars,’ she added.

‘You know just about everything,’ said Bruce, a bit undeservedly, I thought. After all, she did have her laptop…

It took a while to separate the kangaroo meat from the bones and skin. A
messy
while. What with bits of kangaroo gunge sticking to my arms and fingers, not to mention a blob on my nose,
and
mud
and
sweat
and
a few smudges of dinosaur doo, I was pretty stinky.

‘I need a swim before dinner,’ I said.

Phredde sniffed under her arms. ‘Me too,’ she said.

I waited for Bruce to say ‘Me too’ too—Bruce is
always
ready for a swim. But he’d hopped off to dig up a few more roots for Miss Richards.

So Phredde and I took the flying carpet and went swimming by ourselves.

You know something? It’s a bit spooky jumping into a strange, dark river 100,000 years in the past.

Phredde and I stood on the riverbank and stared at the water.

‘You go first,’ I suggested.

‘No, you,’ said Phredde.

‘I said it first,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but you’re bigger than me. You’ll make a great big splash and scare away…well, anything that needs scaring.’

I gulped. ‘Miss Richards said it was perfectly safe. She said there haven’t been any big tentacly things or crocodile-type things for
ages.
She said we just had to be careful not to dive in case we hit our heads on a rock, and to keep together in case one of us gets a cramp and…’

Actually, I think Miss Richards had been more interested in grinding up kurrajong roots than in what Phredde and I were doing, and Bruce had been more
interested in helping her, and Mrs Olsen had been more interested in staring at the bl…, er, red stuff, oozing out of the meat…

In the end we jumped in together.

‘It’s
cold
!’ yelled Phredde, and then she blinked. ‘No it’s not,’ she added. ‘I thought it would be cold as ice because of the glacier, but it’s nice and warm.’

I trod water beside her. ‘It’s funny,’ I said, ‘it’s cold in some spots and warmer in others. It smells a bit funny too. Not really bad—just funny.’

I flung myself back and began to backstroke. The last of the light was fading from the sky, and I could see a bright star beaming away on the horizon—like it didn’t know there was only us to see it. I suppose my eyes had gradually got used to the darkness, because I could see the trees up on the hills too, and a big roundish mountain behind them.

It was pretty nice actually. Warm, soft water getting me all clean, and just me and Phredde and no-one else—except for Mrs Olsen and Bruce and Miss Richards—for thousands of kilometres and a 100,000-odd years.

Maybe humans hadn’t even been invented yet, or evolved, or whatever it was, and we were the only people in the universe, unless there were some aliens crashing their spaceships a few lightyears away. Which meant if we had to stay here forever then Bruce was the only bloke in the world—or he would be when he stopped being a frog. Which meant that he and I…

I suddenly wondered exactly how old Miss Richards was. If she’d left school at eighteen, then three years at uni and one year working…

I thrust the thought away.

‘You know,’ I said, turning over and splashing my version of breaststroke through the water (which means you keep your head out the whole time
and
don’t get your ears wet
and
you can talk to your friends), ‘it’s nice to be able to swim without worrying about a prehistoric monster nibbling your nose.’

‘Yep,’ said Phredde. She was doing phaery backstroke (which means leaning back and letting your wings work like fluttery propellers). ‘Hey, there’s a rock here. I can stand up in the middle of…oooop!’

The rock slowly rose in the water, tumbling Phredde off. You’ve never seen a phaery backstroke so fast. I switched from breaststroke to overarm to get me out of there
then.
Six strokes and 2.5 seconds later (it was a pity there was no Olympic selector timing us) we were up on the riverbank. ‘What was
that
?’ breathed Phredde.

The rock grew bigger and bigger, and then it grew a head as well, with two beady eyes and two big horns.

‘That’s not a rock,’ I said. ‘That’s a turtle.’

‘But it’s BIG,’ said Phredde, gazing at it.

The turtle stared at us with its tiny black eyes then submerged again.

‘Um, what do turtles eat?’ asked Phredde casually.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t
think
they eat humans.’

‘What about phaeries?’

‘Don’t know that either.’

‘We’ll have to ask Miss Richards,’ said Phredde. ‘Huh,’ I said.

We considered giving the flying carpet a rinse, but that would have meant it would be too wet to fly and we’d have to trudge back to the hut, so we didn’t.

The sun was sitting on the horizon like a great big glowing orange (I must remember to use that in
my
next essay) as we flew through the gum trees. I bet my nose would have found our way back even if we’d forgotten how to get there. That roast ’roo smelt
good.

Phredde landed the carpet and we trudged—okay, I trudged and Phredde flew—over to the fire. By now Miss Richards had arranged chair-like rocks for all of us. They even had soft little bark mats on them so our sit-upons didn’t get too cold and numb on the hard stone.

The ’roo was roasting on a spit over the fire and little drops of fat were sizzling as they met the flames. My tummy suddenly remembered how hungry it was. Okay, it wasn’t nice tame sausages or chops from the butchers, but right now I didn’t care.

Miss Richards handed me a hard little cake. I sniffed it. It smelt…well, given I hadn’t eaten for 144 million years, it smelt pretty good.

I took a cautious nibble. The cake was hot and burnt my tongue, but my tongue decided it was in a good cause.

‘Ot is ip?’ I asked.

‘Just kurrajong roots ground to a paste, mixed with some native raspberries for sweetening and a little procoptodon fat,’ Miss Richards said casually. ‘And I found some edible wattle seeds and Bruce helped me grind them into flour,’ she smiled at Bruce over the flames, ‘and I baked them into a sort of flat bread on the rocks.’

Chunks of roast procoptodon in wattle-seed pancakes with chopped watercress is
almost
like chicken kebabs on Lebanese bread with garlic sauce and tabouli. Well,
actually, it isn’t much like it at all, but I was hungry and it wasn’t that bad.

The air grew cooler, but it was warm around the fire. I was just reaching for my third not-really-kebab when Phredde whispered, ‘Look over there!’

I looked. By now I was expecting a herd of who-knows-what-osauruses or fanged leopards about to leap onto us and try to eat us, but it was just the herd of procoptodons grazing beneath the trees. They looked peaceful and sort of cute, even if they did have flat faces. I hoped they wouldn’t recognise their friend on our spit, and it looked like they didn’t. Up in the trees some animals that looked like possums—maybe they even were—chattered and raced along the branches. Down the hill the river glinted as the moon rose and---

‘Wombats!’ whispered Phredde.

Well, they didn’t look like wombats to me—their noses were too long and they had
stripes
and silly little tails,
¹⁴
but they were eating grass just like proper wombats, so as far as I was concerned it didn’t matter if they looked like tiny rhinoceroses in disguise.

Suddenly Bruce’s tongue darted out and speared a mosquito. (That’s one good thing about having a barbecue with Bruce—no flies or mozzies survive to crawl on you.) He’d also eaten some of the roast ’roo, just to keep us company, but he’d done pretty well on insects too.

‘I sort of like this place,’ he said, burping happily.

‘Bruce! Manners!’ said Mrs Olsen. But she said it a bit absent-mindedly. She was gazing wistfully at the herd of flat-faced ’roos. Her fangs glinted white in the
moonlight. ‘I wonder,’ she said hesitantly, ‘if anyone would mind if I…just had a little taste you know…a tiny, tiny suck at their jugulars…’

‘You want to vampirise the ’roos?’ I asked.

‘Not enough to hurt them,’ said Mrs Olsen hurriedly. ‘Just a snack here, a neck there. They’ll hardly know they’ve been vampirised.’

I looked at the others. Miss Richards was busy tying up bark pillows with lengths of thin green vine. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘Me neither,’ said Bruce.

Phredde shrugged. ‘She has to eat something!’ she whispered.

‘Be our guest,’ I said to Mrs Olsen. ‘Er, the ’roos’ guest anyway.’

‘Don’t look,’ said Mrs Olsen, blushing. ‘Oh, how I hate to do this!’

She darted off into the darkness. There was a thud, of the vampire-meets-kangaroo-neck sort, then a long drawn out sigh.

Mrs Olsen had found her dinner.

You know what? A bracken bed—even with a stringybark pillow—in a mud hut isn’t nearly as comfortable as your own bed in your own castle.

The bracken was scratchy and the ground below hard, and it was cold too, even with the bracken fluffed up all round and over me like Miss Richards suggested.

On either side of me I could hear Phredde or Bruce or maybe it was Miss Richards rolling over as they tried to get comfortable, and outside strange creatures plodded or munched or grunted or sometimes screamed in a terrorised way that shut off fast as something guzzled them.

Only Mrs Olsen seemed to have no trouble sleeping. She’d come back from her dinner hunt sort of bloated and now lay flat on her bracken bed with a big smile on her face and a dribble of bl…, er, red stuff on one side of her mouth. She burped occasionally in her sleep, the happy burp of a teacher who’s vampirised a whole herd of flat-faced ’roos.

‘Phredde?’

‘Mmm?’ said Phredde.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No,’ said Phredde. ‘What’s wrong?’

We’re trapped in who knows when and our teacher has gone feral and I think my boyfriend—well, frogfriend—has a thing for older women. Well, older librarians anyway. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, sniffing back a tear. ‘I’m okay.’

‘I’m okay too,’ whispered Phredde.

You know what? It’s funny, but after that I fell asleep.

The dawn chorus woke us up. You know the dawn chorus—it’s when all the little birds go tweet, tweet, tweet, and sing their little hearts out on the branches outside your bedroom window, while Mr Sun starts his long journey through the sky. (That bit was in a kid’s book Mum read me when I was small. The things they put in kids’ books sometimes!)

Our dawn chorus wasn’t like that at all.

First of all there was a sort of booming squawk, like an emu was having its toenails pulled out with rusty pliers, and then a few screams like a mob of piranhas were catching and eating every little birdie in sight. (If piranhas can skeletonise a cow in ten minutes, it makes you wonder how long they’d take to skeletonise a librarian—no, no, Prudence! I told myself. It’s WRONG to think of throwing librarians in the moat, and anyway the castle moat is at least 100,000 years away.)

Well, what with the shrieking and the booming—and a very few tweet, tweet, tweets—we all woke up, except for Mrs Olsen, who just lay there on her back
with her hands crossed over her chest. She still had a smile on her face too.

‘Should we wake her up?’ I whispered.

Miss Richards shook her head. ‘Vampires normally sleep during the day,’ she said. ‘I think it’s the fresh blood that’s done it. She’s reverted.’

‘Reverted to what?’ I asked.

‘A fearsome bloodsucker who stalks the night,’ said Bruce hollowly.

I looked at Mrs Olsen. She did look different lying there.

‘You’re right. Let’s leave her alone,’ I whispered.

Phredde nodded and we all tiptoed out.

The remains of the ’roo were still hanging on the spit where we’d left them. The ’roo didn’t look nearly as tasty this morning. In fact, it looked sort of disgusting, with prehistoric flies crawling all over it.

‘Yum. Breakfast!’ said Bruce. He hopped over to the dead fire, and zapped his tongue away at the flies.

Phredde and I looked away.

‘How about some fresh fish?’ suggested Miss Richards. ‘After you went to bed last night I made a fish trap out of supple young branches tied together. It’s a really clever design—the fish swim into it one way then it gets so narrow they can’t turn around and swim out.’

Well, I couldn’t care less about fish-trap designs, but I
did
feel like some fresh fish. So the three of us wandered down to the riverbank—okay, Miss Richards and I wandered and Phredde fluttered through the rising mist like a cartoon that had got lost from Hollywood.

We had a swim before we checked the traps, in the
hope we might manage to scare a few more fish into them, and also because the water felt nice.

‘See?’ I said after Miss Richards had jumped in after us. ‘I said it was warm!’

Miss Richards nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if there are any thermal springs near here.’

‘What’s a thermal spring?’ asked Phredde, fluttering just above the surface of the river so she could kick water in my face when I wasn’t looking.

‘Places where warm water rises from deep underground. They’re often associated with volcanic activity.’

‘Volcanoes!’ I yelled. I gazed around, but there wasn’t any smoke rising from the hills or great red lava flows coming towards us. ‘I thought there weren’t any volcanoes in Australia.’

‘Not for about 7000 years around here,’ said Miss Richards.

‘But we’re more than 100,000 years in the past so there might be some volcanoes
now
…’

‘I don’t think you need worry.’ Miss Richards rolled over and began to backstroke happily across the river. ‘Places like the North Island in New Zealand have hot springs, but there’s only a volcanic eruption every fifty years or so.’

‘Every fifty years!’ I squeaked.

‘Not across the whole island! Really, it’s quite safe! Just enjoy the warm water. It’s probably flowing down from a hot spring miles and miles away anyway.’

I took another good look around. But the horizon still seemed volcano-less. So I started to think about breakfast instead.

It wasn’t really a surprise when it turned out Miss Richards’s fish traps had worked. She’d tied a vine onto them before she’d thrown them in the water and then tied the other end of the vine
¹⁵
to a tree so they didn’t float away. All we had to do was haul them up and there was our breakfast gazing up at us.

I was a bit afraid that 100,000-year-old fish would still have tentacles, but they looked normal enough, googly eyes and gaping mouths and fins and stuff. You know, like fish.

So Phredde and I looked the other way while Miss Richards bashed them on the head with a rock so they died quickly instead of suffocating up here in the fresh air, then we threaded a long stick through their lips (which was pretty yuk, but the alternative was carrying slippery dead fish in our hands—triple yuk) and hauled them back to camp. There were about a dozen of them, all soft and slippery and scaly.

‘Now, if we hold the fish over the flames on green branches,’ Miss Richards was saying, ‘the scales will singe off, then…aaaarrrrkkkk!’

The aaaarrrrkkkk! was because SOMETHING suddenly leapt out of the tree, onto the cold fly-crusted carcass of the roasted ’roo. Then it turned and snarled at us.

‘The leopard!’ whispered Phredde, her wings buzzing as she shot up into the air and out of the leopard’s reach. ‘It’s come to get its ’roo back!’

The leopard turned to us and snarled again. You could see it had definitely worked out who’d stolen its dinner while it was having a quiet drink by the riverbank—and who’d turned it into a barbecue too.

‘Er…maybe if we apologise!’ I whispered.

‘I don’t think prehistoric leopards understand English,’ croaked Bruce. He always croaks because he’s a frog, but this sounded even more croaky than usual.

The leopard gazed at us, one by one, as though working out exactly which one of us was going to be breakfast instead of its rather diminished kangaroo. Its gaze stopped at me. The leopard slowly padded forward, still staring at me as though working out which bit to chomp first.

‘Er, nice pussy cat,’ I said quickly. ‘Er, there’s a good little pussy cat. Why don’t you have some nice roasted ’roo bones and we’ll all be friends and…’

‘Grrrrrwwwwwlllll,’ said the leopard.

‘Look, really, I don’t taste nice, and there isn’t even any tomato sauce to put on me…’

‘Grrrrwwwwwllll,’ said the leopard.

‘Look…I…er…help!’ I screamed desperately.

The leopard took another step forward, and another…

‘Um, I’ll save you, Prudence,’ croaked Bruce bravely.

‘How?’ I muttered out of the corner of my mouth. ‘Zap a leopard with your tongue? Jump—
splott
—on its head? Bruce, you’re not the right shape for fighting leopards!’

‘I’ll PING myself into a tiger…’ began Bruce, then remembered. ‘I can’t PING anything, can I?’

‘Nope,’ I said. The leopard was almost within leaping range now. I wondered whether to run or climb a tree, but that leopard could climb, couldn’t it? And I was pretty sure it could run faster than me too.

‘Goodbye, Phredde, Bruce,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t try to save me! Save yourselves…’

‘No way!’ yelled Phredde. She suddenly dived on the leopard and landed
plunk
on its back. ‘Don’t you look like that at my friend!’ she shrieked, bashing it with her tiny phaery hands.

The leopard took no notice whatsoever.

‘Um, I second that!’ croaked Bruce. He leapt too, right onto the leopard’s head.

You’d have thought that leopard had berserk phaeries and giant frogs on its back every day. It kept its gaze fixed on me.

It crouched down, ready to spring. Its massive jaws opened…

I shut my eyes.

‘Ahhh haiii!’ yelled Miss Richards. I opened my eyes.

Miss Richards was hopping towards the leopard on one leg. The other was sort of hooked up next to her waist but, as I watched, it went
zot
! right into the leopard’s kidneys!

‘Grrwwlpp!’ the leopard snarled, and swung around towards her.

‘Great shot, Miss Richards!’ I yelled.

‘Haii uppp!’ Miss Richards charged again. I hadn’t seen her so angry since Edwin kept the
Encyclopaedia of Fascinating Fishes
out until it was three weeks overdue!

Zapo! Bam!
Her left leg shot out this time and caught the leopard on the nose. The leopard went cross-eyed for a moment, trying to see what had happened, then stared at her with its big brown eyes.

‘Way to go, Miss Richards!’ yelled Bruce, leaping off the leopard’s back.

‘Yippee!’ shouted Phredde, flying up into the air again.

That’s when the leopard charged. One minute it was just crouching there, the next it leapt right over Bruce and onto Miss Richards even before she could get a karate leg up.

Luckily librarians have pretty fast reflexes. Miss Richards ducked back, so the first giant swipe of the leopard’s claws just ripped her blouse and skirt right down the middle. The leopard raised its claws again and…

Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
Something with giant feet zoomed into the clearing.

BONGGGGGG! One large leathery leg—not like Miss Richards’s at all—kicked the leopard’s head.

The leopard dropped to the ground.

‘Wha---’ stammered Miss Richards, holding her

blouse together.

‘Glooop! Glopp, glopp, glooop!’

It was as tall as our school library. It had feathers too (well actually, our library doesn’t have feathers—but this did). It looked a bit like an emu on steroids, but even steroids wouldn’t make an emu as giant as this. Or as ferocious.

‘Gloop! Gloopp!’ the giant bird roared, glaring down at the silent leopard. For about two seconds it peered down at us as well, as though considering if we were worth a giant emu kick or not. Then it decided we weren’t. With one last scornful look at the leopard it grabbed the ’roo carcass in its massive beak then strode off with it through the trees, leaving a stunned librarian, a shaky kid, an amazed phaery, a frog with its mouth open and a dead-looking leopard behind it. We
listened to the thud of its footbeats slowly dying away, and a final booming: ‘Gloop! Glopp!’

‘Wha…what was that!’ stammered Phredde shakily.

‘A prehistoric superhero?’ I whispered. ‘But with feathers.’

Miss Richards fumbled with her laptop. Her face was white and bleeding a bit where the leopard had scratched it. She looked pretty stunned too. ‘That,’ she said, as she scrolled down the screen, ‘was a
Bullockornis planei,
otherwise known as a mihirung or thunder bird or…’ she gulped, ‘a Demon Duck of Doom!’