The Phredde Collection (42 page)
Koalas
I opened my eyes.
‘Are we dead?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Phredde beside me shakily.
‘Me either,’ said Bruce.
I let go of their hands and looked around. ‘Mrs Olsen!’ I said weakly. ‘What are you doing here? And Miss Richards!’
Miss Richards blinked. ‘I…I just suddenly was here!’
‘Where’s the volcano!’ I demanded. ‘Where’s all the poison gas and rocks and…’
All I could see were gum trees and blue sky and grass under our feet. There wasn’t a sign of hurtling airborne boulders or spewing lava or…‘What’s happened?’ I cried.
‘You PINGed!’ said Phredde wonderingly.
‘But…but I can’t!’ I stammered.
‘You must have!’ said Bruce. ‘I felt it! You grabbed my hand and then you PING!ed with us…’
‘I felt it too!’ cried Phredde. ‘The three of us PINGed together!’
‘But…but…’ I said. I tried to PING up a banana and blueberry thickshake with extra ice-cream but nothing happened. ‘See, it doesn’t work!’ I said.
‘Maybe it only works when you do it with your friends,’ said Miss Richards gently. ‘When you really absolutely need to…’
‘Like…like if we’re going to be blown up in a volcano?’ I suggested faintly.
‘Something like that. Yes,’ said Miss Richards.
I considered this. Maybe she was right…
‘Where…where are we?’ said Phredde. She still sounded pretty shaky. ‘Where’s the hut? And the river?’
‘Where’s Cuddles!’ I yelled, suddenly frantic.
‘Quack,’ said something behind my back. Cuddles waddled up and pecked my knee viciously to say hello. I scooped him up. ‘You’re safe too!’ I cried. ‘But where are we?’
Suddenly I saw it. It was in a tree and it wasn’t doing much at all. Just eating a gum leaf like it was wondering whether to fall asleep or not…
‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘There’s a koala!’
An Interesting School Excursion
Yes, it WAS the Big Koala Wildlife Park. Somehow Phredde and Bruce and I had PINGed us all back to our own time
and
to the right place.
In fact it was EXACTLY the right time, because just then the school buses drew up and no-one had noticed we’d been missing at all, because we hadn’t gone yet. (Yeah, I know it’s confusing, but time travel is like that. If you really think about it I’m 144 million years old now, but don’t tell Mum because there’s no way she can fit 144 million candles on my next birthday cake and she’d really hate to be even older than that and because she’s my mum she’d have to be…)
Of course everyone was a bit surprised to see Miss Richards there because she was supposed to be back in the library at school. They were even more surprised to see her wearing a ripped leopard-skin miniskirt, and to see me and Phredde in snake-skin skirts too. (You
should have seen Amelia’s face—she was
so
jealous.)
And everyone was
really
well behaved all day, even Edwin, because Mrs Olsen still looked, well, vampire-like and even when she smiled her fangs sort of shone and you really, really didn’t want to get on her bad side.
But apart from that it was a pretty good excursion and the koalas were cool even if they didn’t do much (they were a bit of a letdown actually after rhoetosauruses and a Demon Duck of Doom). And I had three hamburgers and a sausage roll and two milkshakes from the kiosk.
Cuddles liked hamburgers and milkshakes too. In fact, he had even more than me. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have any money to pay for them, either (I’d left my school bag back in the Jurassic) because the lady at the kiosk said sort of nervously that the little bird could have all the hamburgers he wanted, and so could I, but please get him to stop eating the tables.
And then we went home.
Home to the Castle
I had to explain to Mum how come I’d lost my tracksuit and come back with a leather skirt and top, of course. I
think
she believed me, especially when Cuddles started kicking down the kitchen door till Gark fed him a leg of lamb and two banana cakes and half a dozen lettuces and a cucumber and three tomatoes. (Cuddles really
loved
tomatoes.)
‘So he just followed me home from 100,000 years ago!’ I finished. ‘Can I keep him, Mum? Please? He’s just a baby and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go because his mum is 100,000 years away!’
Mum looked at Cuddles a bit warily. ‘Well, I don’t think the dog pound or the RSPCA would accept a Demon Duck of Doom.’
‘Just a baby one,’ I put in.
‘Even a baby one. So I suppose we’ll have to keep him.’
‘Quack,’ said Cuddles happily, inspecting the video to see if he could eat it.
‘But I don’t know what your father will say,’ finished Mum.
‘He’ll say what he said when I gave him the jaguar and the giant sloth and the piranhas!’ I said happily. ‘He’ll just gasp a bit and then he’ll say—“Great, Prudence, great. Just what we need.”’
‘Quack,’ agreed Cuddles, crunching up the video.
I left Cuddles in the kitchen finishing off the potatoes and a couple of watermelons and the garbage bin, and climbed the tower stairs to find Mark. I’d got a present for him.
It was this really great idea I’d had during the afternoon at the Big Koala Park and Phredde’s mum had PINGed it up for me when she came to pick us up, because somehow the flying carpet had got lost in the explosion and Phredde still couldn’t PING till she got her next allowance and we didn’t have any money to get a bus home because my school bag was still 100,000 years away. (I’d tried PINGing again too, but it still hadn’t worked. I guess Miss Richards was right. I could only PING with my friends if I really HAD to.)
‘Hey, Dog Breath,’ I yelled, ‘I’m home!’
‘So what?’ said Mark’s voice behind the door. He sounded depressed.
I opened the door and there was Mark, lying on his bed (he has a doggie basket too for when he’s a werewolf) and looking miserable.
‘I’ve been thinking about you and Tracey,’ I said.
‘There is no me and Tracey,’ said Mark sadly. ‘She never wants to see me again!’
‘Look, cheer up…’ I said.
Mark shook his head. ‘I’ll never be happy again! She had the longest whitest fangs of any werewolf I’ve ever
met,’ he mourned. ‘And the glossiest coat and the fluffiest tail and the prettiest paws and…’
‘No, Mark, really,’ I said.
‘What?’ muttered Mark.
‘I’ve got something for you. It’ll fix everything up.’
Mark looked vaguely hopeful. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s in the corridor,’ I said. ‘It won’t fit in your room.’
Mark hauled himself off the bed and peered out into the corridor. ‘What the…!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where did you get THAT, Pruneface?’
‘Oh, I saw one like it back in the Jurassic,’ I said airily. ‘And I got Phredde’s mum to PING up one just like it.’
‘I’ve
never
seen one as big as that!’ breathed Mark. ‘It’s awesome, Pruneface, simply awesome.’
‘It’s not bad,’ I said airily. ‘Do you think Tracey will like it?’
‘Like it! It’s the biggest bone in the world today!’ he sniffed. ‘And the smelliest!’ he added admiringly.
‘Well, we didn’t have any fridges back in the Jurassic,’ I confessed. ‘And you’d smell too if you were a 144-million-year-old dinosaur bone.’
For a moment I thought he was going to ask exactly what I’d been doing back in the Jurassic. But you know brothers—they’ve got one-track minds. ‘I bet Tracey has never even smelt a bone as pongy as that one!’ cried Mark. Suddenly he looked at me a bit worriedly. ‘You’re sure you can spare it, Pruneface? I mean, it’s such a super awesome bone.’
‘I can spare it,’ I assured him. ‘I hardly ever eat dinosaur bones.’
‘Okay!!!’ Mark dashed to the mirror, combed his hair, inspected his teeth—normal-size teeth today
because he wasn’t a werewolf at the moment—then dashed out into the corridor and began tugging the dinosaur bone down the stairs.
Not Quite the End
(Because who knows when we’ll have our next adventure.)
Well, that’s the end of that story. Mum said I had to keep my snake-skin skirt and top for really
special
occasions, but she didn’t say what they were. And Dad built Cuddles a special Demon Duck of Doom house down in the rose garden, except it isn’t a rose garden any more because Cuddles ate the rose bushes
and
six bags of fertiliser and the spade.
And that night, as I was brushing my teeth for bed (it was even good to have a toothbrush again—believe it or not, dental hygiene had become much more important to me since I’d seen the mouths of those who didn’t brush
or
floss), I looked out the window and there, up on the castle turret in the light of the full moon, were two werewolves, their heads close together, howling contentedly at the sky.
I smiled. Mark was happy again and so was I, and I
had the two best friends in the world, and it didn’t matter if I couldn’t PING all the time, like them.
In fact I didn’t even
think
about PINGing again till we were down that secret tunnel with the skeleton and…
But that’s another story.
21
21
See
Phredde and the Purple Pyramid.
A Few Weird Animals in this Book
The Demon Duck of Doom (aka thunder bird, mirihung,
Bullockornis planei
): These grew to two metres high or more, and weighed about 200-300 kilos. The name ‘Demon Duck of Doom’ was given to them by Walter Boles of the Australian Museum, who has studied the petrified brain of one of them. The Tjapwurong people of Western Victoria called giant birds like these ‘mirihung paringmal’ and had an oral tradition (history passed on in stories) about these giant emu-like birds who were alive when volcanoes were still erupting in Victoria—at least 6000 or 7000 years ago.
Spotty leopard or lion:
Thylacoleo carnifex,
a bit smaller than a modern leopard, with knife-like teeth and a long tail. Its back feet were like a possum’s so it could probably climb trees—but I don’t know if it was spotty or not! Modern native cats can have faintly
spotty fur, so I decided to give the leopard in this story spots and soft fur as well and call it a leopard instead of a lion (it isn’t really either a lion or a leopard).
Long-nosed wombats:
Neohelos
ranged from the size of a big dog to the size of a hippopotamus and, of course, had long noses.
Giant tree kangaroos:
Bohra paulae.
Imagine a possum the size of an Alsatian dog with a long nose and a pouch and a really long tail, and you’ve just about got it. Modern tree kangaroos eat leaves and new shoots and fruit and blossom; maybe giant tree kangaroos ate
lots
of these, or maybe they ate other food too.
Flat-faced kangaroos:
Procoptodon pusio
. These looked like modern kangaroos that someone had punched in the face. Their arms were longer, and like wallabies (and humans) they could probably use their arms and hands to pull down vines and branches and pick up fruit.
Giant kangaroo:
Procoptodon goliath
(or short-faced giant kangaroos). (My reference doesn’t have the h in goliath, a common enough misprint.) Really
big
kangaroos with flat faces. They had a large single toe on each foot, and each hand had two long fingers with large claws.
Giant goanna:
Megalania prisca.
Seven metres long and weighing about 600 kilos. It probably looked pretty much like modern goannas, except for its size.
Furry rhinoceros:
Zygomaturus trilobus
. Think of a wombat crossed with a rhinoceros and the size of a cow.
Rhoetosaurus: About fifteen metres long and weighing probably twenty tonnes. They had a short, stiff tail and a very long neck.
Paracyclotosaurus davidi: A 2.5-metre-long amphibian with a wide mouth that lurked under the water to suck in passing fish—or kids lost from the twenty-first century!
Giant echidna:
Zaglossus ramsayi.
They probably ate worms and beetles as well as the ants and termites that modern echidnas mostly eat today.
Giant turtle:
Meiolania platyceps.
About two metres long with spiky horns and a spiked tail and powerful claws. It probably lived on land as well as on the water.
The main problem with finding out how extinct animals lived is that they’re dead—you can’t just go and have a look! All we have are fossils of their bones or their footprints and sometimes eggs. So scientists have to work out what shape they were and what sounds they made and what they ate either by examining the bone structure and working out where muscles and tendons would have gone, or by looking for modern animals which might live the same way.
I decided to give the marsupial ‘leopards’ in this book spots because modern quolls have spots, and they also live in Australian forests and eat meat—but the marsupial ‘leopards’ might have been bright orange with purple feet for all we know (probably not, though, as most animals blend in with their environment so fierce animals can’t see them too easily and eat them—or, if they are fierce animals, so their dinner doesn’t notice them too soon as they sneak up and pounce).
There’s no evidence either that Demon Ducks of Doom hatched their eggs like brush turkeys do, in mounds of leaves. They might have laid them in termite mounds, like goannas, or the male Demon Duck might have looked after the eggs, like modern emus. But while Demon Ducks looked a bit like emus, they are more closely related to geese and ducks, so I decided not to base their behaviour on emus.
If you decide to study thunder birds, you may come up with a much better idea of how they lived!
If you want to know more about Australian prehistoric animals (which are often really different from the American or European ones that you see in Hollywood movies) or Aussie volcanoes or how to survive in the bush if you’re suddenly stranded there by a flying carpet out of control, zap down to the library. You may not find Miss Richards, but there
will
be someone who can point you to the books that’ll tell you what you want to know!
22
