by Susan Berran
So this was possibly going to be a bit tricky, actually it was going to be just about impossible.
Shoes … where were our shoes? At that very moment, the universe seemed to stand still for just a second as we both got a very clear picture in our mind. A picture of our shoes sitting neatly by the front door step of Aunty Ree’s and Uncle Karl’s …
… oh #?X?# !!
They’d know we’d been there and they’d think we let the goats in. I mean you know and I know that we did let them in but we didn’t want them to know we let the goats in.
This was one of those rare times when you wished that you had alien friends that would visit and take you back to their place for a millennium or two. Because now if we survived the toe-jam and could manage to survive Mum, we sure as heck would not survive Uncle Karl!
BOOM!! RUMBLE RUMBLE…
The rain was getting closer, we had to move.
We collected up a couple of rocks and made a little stepping stone path for Jared to cross. From behind the rock pile we had a much better view of the area. I surveyed the scene while Jared kept lookout. A couple of old trucks and car bodies were strewn around, some fallen dead trees scattered about the place and a few more rock piles that wouldn’t hide a mouse on a diet. There was one upside down truck body that wasn’t too far to reach so that was going to be our pit stop. Jared had taken off his T-shirt, ripped it in half and wrapped up his feet as best as he could to protect them, using the torn off edge to tie them on. He was ready. I kept watch then … “Go!”
Jared TOOK OFF! He tried to leap over as much dung as he could but it didn’t matter where he landed, there was no way to avoid it. He splooshed and splashed his way through the poop, over rocks and around stumps. With dung spitting down all over him, he got to the old truck, he’d made it! It was weird though. Usually when you see an old car or truck body lying in a field, it’d be consumed by weeds. Here we were, in a field of dirt, with the wrecks being consumed by piles of cow poop! Some of the poop piles were so big that I thought maybe OLD MR INDITE was hiding a few dinosaurs in there somewhere.
It was my turn to dash. Jared gave me the signal and I was off. I slopped on through the cow dung as fast as I could possibly go. The poop was sticking to my toe-jam, making it thicker and heavier and harder to run. And because it was so fresh, rocks and sticks were embedding into my toe-jammed feet as I ran as well. When the truck was only a couple of steps away, I thought I’d just do one big flying leap. So I leapt like a graceful ballerina and landed like a TEN TONNE elephant sliding on its backside through the mud. Except that it wasn’t mud, it was cow poop, fresh, warm, smelly, cow poop. My butt carved a nice smooth path through the dung and threw waves of poop up into the air as I slid straight under the tray of the truck.
The truck was one of those big dirt carriers so there was heaps of room to move about under there.
Using a rock, I scratched a map onto the truck’s metal tray for us to plan our next few moves. We could see that the gate into the hidden area was locked but we knew where the key was. It had been the first thing OLD MR INDITE had checked on when he came out before. Now we just needed some cover to get across to the steel gate.
aH hA! An old dead tree trunk had fallen and split into two and it looked like it was going to be just long enough. We figured that if we crouched down, we could both fit under it and crawl along to make our way into the other area. But it was just out of reach. It was time for my utility belt. Luckily I always carried my excellent extendo rod with invisible rope, well, almost invisible rope. It was actually one of those telescopic fishing rods that pushes into itself.
We could use it to hook the trunk and reel it in. So while Jared kept watch I extended the rod and cast …
FFssss … plop , FFssss … plop. I tried again and again. Each time the hook would plop into the mounds of poop covering the trunk. FFssss … plop, FFssss … THUD!
Got it! I started reeling it in. Jared was sure the line would break but I knew it was strong enough.
Me and Dad had been out fishing once when we heard a distress call on the radio from a submarine. It couldn’t get to the surface and was leaking, they were all going to drown! I swam down to the sub … Dad isn’t a very good swimmer … and tied on our line. Luckily I’m a champion at holding my breath. I had to fight off a couple of hungry sharks on the way down and then the line was too short. So I tied a couple of giant squid together to reach the sub. At least the shark’s teeth made a cool necklace. And then we just reeled the submarine up. We’re not allowed to tell anyone though, because it was a BULRAVIAN SPY SUB. I’m pretty sure there’s a statue of me in Bulravia though. Probably with a shark under one arm and holding the submarine above my head with the other. So I knew the line was strong enough to reel in one old tree trunk.
Closer, closer, … crack , snap! The handle suddenly broke off the rod. It must have been weakened by the submarine’s weight; yeah, that was probably it. I did a quick repair job and we were off. The trunk was near enough for us to slide on our stomachs and slip straight underneath. Jared went first, then me. It was very ‘cosy’ under there. I was a lot closer to Jared’s butt than I really wanted to be.
It was slow going. The trunk was extremely really heavy on our backs and with every crawling ‘step’, the trunk moved and slipped, sending splinters slicing through my skin. But we had to keep going. We inched our way across the open area like some sort of ugly, wooden tortoise in camouflage. Ever so slowly, we made our way over to the steel fence.
I was continually peeking through a small crack to make sure MOLLY and OLD MR INDITE were still in the house.
Once we reached the fence, we stayed right up hard against it and inched our way towards the enormous gates. Jared was finding it harder and harder to crawl. The toe-jam was making its way further around both his hands and getting thicker like mine. It looked like he was wearing furry gloves with the thumbs cut out. And I now had toe-jam starting to creep up my legs. My feet looked like they’d been shoved into big, mouldy-green watermelons.
We were getting close, only one or two more moves and we’d be at the gate … the big, closed, locked gate. And just to make things even worse, we could hear the sound of raindrops falling on top of our tortoise trunk hideaway. If we could just get a bit closer, I could use my awesome extendo rod to ‘catch’ the keys from their hook by the front door and then just reel them in.
We were just about to crawl a bit further when Jared whispered urgently, "Down!” We stopped dead and I peeked through the crack. OLD MR INDITE was coming out of the door, closely followed by the deadly black beast. MOLLY'S nose shot straight up into the air and sucked in a huge whiff. oh No, she could smell us, I was sure of it. I tucked my legs in as far as I could and got right up against Jared’s butt. We were cheek to cheek.
I just wasn’t real happy about the cheek that my cheek was pressing on.
We stayed perfectly still. Through the crack I could see MOLLY leaping all around OLD MR INDITE, her fangs drooling, her tongue slobbering and slurping.
OLD MR INDITE turned to get something … a shotgun?! No. It was much smaller
… Phew!
He threw something towards us … THUD! It hit our trunk, sending the sound echoing right through my head. MOLLY bounded straight towards us. She looked and sounded like a mammoth in full charge. Huge, hairy, strong … and ANGRY!
With only a metre left she hit the brakes and came skidding towards us. Her front paws dug deep into the ground and sprayed dirt straight at us.
I closed my eyes, Jared clenched his cheeks against mine and we held tight just waiting for the crash … silence. I opened my eye against the crack of the trunk. A tongue was hanging right there. Slobber dangling from it like a yoyo stretching down, then jumping back up with every breath. So close that I got a face full of her smelly, warm stench. As her head went past, I could see what OLD MR INDITE had thrown. It was a ball, just a crappy, tatty old tennis ball. MOLLY took a step … then stopped. She dropped the bal
l into the red dust and stuck those huge cavernous nostrils into the air again. Her stance became rigid as she sniffed all around, her top lip began to curl up and quiver to reveal her teeth. As she turned, the sunshine glinted off her fangs, blinding me for a second … oh, Oh, we’d been sniffed out. We readied ourselves. On the count of three, we had to lift and throw off the trunk. Then it was every man for himself, in the race to get back under the fence before MOLLY could catch one of us and chuck us around like a well-worn RAG DOLL. The thought of my limbs farewelling each other as they departed my body, was not a pretty one so this was going to be a world record sprint.
One … two … two and a half … two and three quarters … two and six eighths …
"MOLLY!! Stop SNiffiNG S##t, BriNG ya BaLL!” bellowed OLD MR INDITE.
It was as if someone had thrown her a big juicy steak. In an instant she stopped sniffing, picked up the ball and galloped back to OLD MR INDITE, snuffling and slobbering all around his legs.
We were saved. The one great thing about being covered in CRAP was smelling like CRAP! At least now we had some defence, A WEAPON. And if she came back, I could always add to the smell. After all, I am the school’s famous but mysterious ‘Stink Bomber’. I hold the record for, ‘Causing a teacher to evacuate the students’. I can clear a classroom in under eight seconds. No one knows it’s me, except Jared of course. We watched as OLD MR INDITE unlocked the gate, removed the heavy chain and entered. He looked pretty damn fit for someone as ancient as him. We hadn’t noticed before, but he had one bung leg. He was limping quite badly. The right leg seemed like it was as stiff as a board, probably from one of the wars like Crabby Abbey had said.
Hopefully he was going to feed those poor starving cows out in the desert.
We heard an engine start, spluttering and chugging, and it was coming this way. Within minutes they were back. OLD MR INDITE was driving a rusty old tractor with a sort of conveyor belt attached to the side of it. At the front end was this wide shovel-like scoop and at the back was a trailer bouncing around with MOLLY sitting in it, like some over-protective security guard.
Where was the food for the cows?
Just then the tractor stopped. OLD MR INDITE started pulling levers and winding cranks. The shovel at the front tilted down until it was just about touching the ground, the conveyor belt clunked and began to turn as well. He gave the engine a good rev and they were off, at the pace of a slug climbing an oily slippery dip.
“Can you see all this Sam?” Jared whispered.
“Yeah, weird eh?” I whispered back. As the tractor drove along, the shovel was scooping up the cow poop and the conveyor belt carried it to the trailer at the back. It was a ‘SUPER POOPER SCOOPER’, scooping up four or five poops at a time and carving a clean path through the crap as it went. Ok, so this was what he was up to … cleaning his paddock!
“Maybe he’s just a neat freak,” I said, trying to figure it out.
“He probably likes the cows to eat off nice clean dirt,” said Jared.
Sometimes I wonder if Jared hears what comes out of his own mouth.
“Yeah … maybe,” I replied sarcastically. So it seemed that this was how he collected his world-class manure. But what was so special about manure from starving cows with diarrhoea?
We had to stay hidden while we waited for the tractor to go down a slight hill; it would only be out of sight for a minute. My legs were cramping badly and Jared said that if he couldn’t get out soon, our hideaway was going to be a bit moister and a lot smellier.
“Ready? Let’s go,” I declared whispered.
We crawled as fast as we could, alongside the steel fence, in through the gate and then back along the fence line, now on the inside of the hidden area. We needed to get a good distance from the gate and Jared could see a big thick purple umbrella-type bush just up ahead. We rammed straight into it, shoving aside the vine-like branches and coming to a halt safely underneath. Once under its leafy cover, we heaved the trunk off our backs.
Phew! The bush was like being under one of those big beach umbrellas, nice, thick and dry. We could stay under here forever, there was plenty of room. We sat up and stretched our legs, scratched our butts and pulled out our wedgies. This was perfect. There was enough room for both of us to lie down or sit up and the bush was so thick that we wouldn’t be seen.
There was one thing that I was really curious about though. Outside the steel fence and for a couple of kilometres, it was a completely dead desert, we hadn’t even seen a single blade of grass. So how was it that we were sitting under this bush? This HUGE, lush purple bush.
We leant forward and parted the leaves to see what else was out there.
WOOWWW!!!
The Red Sands!
S t r e t c h i n g out right before our eyes were these WEIRD looking paddocks with high deep red mounds all over them and lush purple bushes scattered about all over the place. Where did the desert go? And there were cows, lots of big FAT cows. Not just happily overweight ones. But cows like when you’re watching a really excellent movie and you’ve had way too many drinks. Your bladder feels like it’s about to EXPLODE but you’re waiting for an ad to come on. So you start doing this little dance shuffle to try and hang on even longer. Then it gets so bad that you know that when you get up from your seat, your bladder’s probably going to let go like a dam bursting. So as soon as the ads start, you do this flying leap out of your seat and SPRINT to the toilet, to only just make it by a microsecond.
YEP, THEY WERE THAT fat! I reckon if they brushed up against something they’d probably explode. And then we noticed something even more interesting.
WOW! Was OLD MR INDITE a clean freak or what? It was just like the kids at school had said, only the cows weren’t wearing raincoats, they were wearing these big, baggy nappies. We didn’t know why yet, but for some reason, OLD MR INDITE obviously wanted to keep this area really clean. And it was; there wasn’t a single cow poop in sight, not a single one. Apart from the purple bushes everywhere, the ground was just bare red dirt. There was also a really old crappy shed with its back against a hill, it looked like that was where the tractor lived. It only looked big enough for the tractor and maybe a workbench. So he obviously wasn’t hiding any great secret in there.
What was going on?
The rain was still only a few drops and we could hear the tractor chugging around out in the desert field. It was time to explore. The bushes were all the same, purple, lush and umbrella-like. At least we had plenty of hiding places for when OLD MR INDITE came back. It looked like the bushes were all the cows had to eat and they were definitely pigging out on them. But then, why wasn’t he feeding the other ones out in the desert?
We took off, heading up one of the deep red mounds, dodging between cows and bushes. With every footstep, a tiny puff of red dust floated up, the dirt was as fine as powder. And all the time we were listening to the sound of the tractor so that we knew where it was. We could see chicken wire fencing in a little circle at the top of each mound. So, there had to be something interesting up there.
My legs were getting stiffer, the toe-jam had reached my knees and was still growing. Jared’s hands had stiffened even more, beginning to take on a BALL-SHAPE. As we came to the top of the mound, we could see that the wire was surrounding an opening to a shaft that went straight down into the darkness. These had to be the Red Sands mines that we’d read about in those old newspapers and seen on the disc back at Uncle Karl’s place. Jared took out his mini binoculars and checked out the other mounds. They all seemed to have a shaft and some even had what looked like a ladder poking out of them. I picked up a rock the size of my fist and dropped it down the hole to see how deep it was. Someone told me once that a rock drops about three metres a second, so we kept count as the rock dropped. We counted for a while then we just decided that it was a really, really, really long way down. The answer had to be in one of the shafts. So we headed off to the nearest one that appeared to have a ladder.
By the tim
e we got to the next mound, my feet were aching terribly and my legs were as stiff as a board. Jared couldn’t use his hands properly any more, so just getting over the little chicken wire fence was proving difficult for both of us. How could we possibly climb down the ladder?
We knew OLD MR INDITE and MOLLY would be back soon, the trailer had to be full of CRAP by now.
Jared stepped down onto the first rung of the ladder very cautiously, then …
“I can’t grab the rungs, my fingers won’t bend,” he said, sounding really worried.
“Ok, I’ll go first then,” I replied, stepping onto the ladder. My hands were fine to hold on to the rungs. But when I went to step down to the next rung, I couldn’t bend my legs at all.
CHUG , CHUG , CHUG . . .
The tractor was on its way back! Probably to drop off a load of poop. And the nearest bush was halfway down the mound. We had to either leap down a deep dark hole with no idea of how deep it was or what was at the bottom. Or, get back down the hill to hide under a bush before OLD MR INDITE got back, otherwise we’d be spotted for sure. Jared TOOK OFF down the hill, with me hobbling behind and kicking up clouds of red dust with every clumsy, stumbling step. I looked over my shoulder, the front of the tractor was just about to come through the gate. I threw my body to the ground and rolled the last metre or so to get under the bush … BOOF!! I smacked straight into Jared under there and my elbow joined his nose, like a brick joining a marshmallow. He held both hands tightly over his mouth to hold back a scream of pain. His eyes started to bulge and tears of agony rolled down his cheeks as his face went from pink to a pale yellowy-white. Just then, we heard a deep RUMBLING and felt the earth move. Staring into each other’s eyes with FEAR, I could tell we were both thinking the same thing; earthquake? It hit again, and again … and again … this was no earthquake; it was MOLLY!
