Run! The Elephant Weighs a Ton

by Adam Frost

  To Samuel Babich

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Zoological Society of London

  Also by Adam Frost

  Chapter 1

  ‘Can’t believe we got roped into this,’ Tom Nightingale whispered to his best friend, Freddy Finch.

  It was the night of the school concert and Tom and Freddy were standing in the wings, waiting to go onstage. Tom was holding his trumpet and Freddy was holding his oboe. The hall was packed with parents and teachers and family friends. Mr McCluskey, the Head Teacher, was standing in front of the curtains, thanking everyone for coming on such a cold evening.

  Tom was starting to feel a bit jittery. His hair, which normally stuck up at the back, had been plastered down on to his head and he was wearing a bright white shirt and a dark blue tie. Freddy’s hair was in a side parting and he was wearing a black blazer that was far too big for him.

  ‘Are you nervous?’ Tom asked Freddy.

  ‘Er, no, course not,’ replied Freddy, looking terrified. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, er, no way,’ said Tom, trying to remember whether he’d already been to the toilet or ought to go again.

  ‘And here they are, the Junior School Orchestra!’ declared Mr McCluskey.

  There was no more time to feel nervous. The curtain had risen and Mrs Purcell, the music teacher, was leading them out on to the stage.

  Tom had to concentrate. They were going to be playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ and Tom had only ever played it through twice without making a mistake.

  Freddy had already admitted that he was going to pretend to play his oboe. He said to Tom that Olivia Darnell made such a racket on her violin that you couldn’t hear anyone else anyway.

  But Tom loved his trumpet. He wanted to play it well. Besides, his mum and dad, his grandad and his sister were in the audience. He wanted to put on a good show for them.

  Mrs Purcell sat down at a piano on one side of the stage. She craned her neck round and counted them in. Tom took a deep breath and started to play.

  He got through the first two bars without any mistakes. He got through the next two bars without any mistakes. He started to relax.

  He looked at Freddy pretending to blow down his oboe, but looked away quickly. He didn’t want to start laughing into his trumpet.

  He kept playing, growing more confident as they reached the second verse. He even felt brave enough to look into the audience and pick out his family in the fifth row.

  Everything was going well. He was sailing into the final few bars when he felt his finger slip off one of the valves. He missed a note, but recovered quickly and played the next. He played the last few notes slightly out of time, trying to catch up with the rest of the orchestra.

  He could feel himself going red. When the audience burst into applause, he couldn’t hear it. He was too busy staring straight ahead, looking at nothing, holding his trumpet loosely by his side.

  ‘Five minutes of miming and nobody suspected a thing!’ Freddy said to Tom, as they walked offstage.

  ‘Frederick Finch, I’d like a word with you,’ said Mrs Purcell, appearing behind them. ‘Well done, Tom! YOU were excellent!’

  But Tom didn’t hear Freddy or Mrs Purcell; he just walked silently backstage.

  When the concert was over, he went out into the hall to meet his family. The hall was still half full, with people smiling and chatting while they waited for their children.

  Mrs Nightingale gave her son a big hug. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  Mr Nightingale ruffled Tom’s plastered-down hair. ‘You were brilliant, son.’

  Then Grandad hobbled forward, holding his walking stick. ‘You’re a natural, Tom. A natural!’

  Tom looked surprised. ‘You mean you didn’t hear me mess it up at the end?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Sophie. ‘You were note perfect.’

  ‘But I got the end totally wrong!’ Tom wailed.

  ‘Did you?’ The Nightingales looked at each other in surprise and then looked back at Tom.

  ‘Well, if you did, nobody heard it,’ Sophie said. ‘Honestly.’

  At that moment, Mrs Nightingale’s phone started to buzz. She glanced down at it.

  ‘It’s the zoo,’ she said. ‘I’m going to answer it and then we’re all going out for pizza.’

  Mrs Nightingale was Chief Vet at London Zoo, so she had to leave her phone on most of the time. Mr Nightingale worked at the zoo too, as a zookeeper in the large-mammals section. Grandad was retired now, but he had once been Chief Vet just like his daughter.

  ‘Look, Tom,’ Mr Nightingale said, crouching down, ‘I know you’re a perfectionist, but seriously, it sounded amazing.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I knew I’d mess it up and I did,’ he mumbled.

  Mrs Nightingale returned to join them. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ she asked.

  ‘Bad,’ said Mr Nightingale.

  ‘The vet up at Whipsnade Zoo has caught chickenpox. And they’re an elephant keeper down,’ said Mrs Nightingale.

  ‘So what’s the good news, Mum?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘They want me and your dad to spend the summer at Whipsnade.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Mr Nightingale, giving his wife a big hug.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Mrs Nightingale. ‘Elephants were my first love as a vet. But I don’t really get the chance to work with them that much. They were all moved from London Zoo to Whipsnade years ago to give them more space. Obviously I help up in Whipsnade now and then, but it’s not the same as spending the whole summer there.’

  ‘So are we all going?’ Sophie asked. ‘Where will we stay?’

  ‘Stay?’ echoed her mother. ‘We’ll stay at home, of course.’

  ‘But Whipsnade is miles away,’ protested Sophie.

  ‘So we’ll move our home a little closer,’ said Mrs Nightingale.

  The Nightingale family lived on a houseboat just behind the zoo, on Regent’s Canal. Grandad had his own boat at the other end of the marina.

  Sophie frowned and then a smile spread across her face. ‘Ohhh, NOW I get it,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll sail up the Grand Union Canal!’ declared Mrs Nightingale. ‘It’ll be the school holidays so we can take our time. We’ll moor at Apsley and we can all spend every day at Whipsnade.’

  ‘Splendid!’ exclaimed Grandad. ‘Any excuse for an expedition.’

  Tom was beginning to feel excited, but tried not to show it.

  Mrs Nightingale turned to him. ‘Of course, if you’d rather stay here and feel sorry for yourself, then that’s fine too.’

  Tom was silent for a few moments, then he grunted, ‘It’s OK. I’m fine.’

  Sophie took his trumpet. ‘Just don’t think about this for a few weeks,’ she said. ‘Leave the trumpeting to the elephants!’

  Chapter 2

  Two days later, the Nightingale family were on their way to Whipsnade. Mr and Mrs Nightingale’s barge led the way, with Grandad’s following close behind.

  As the boats slid through the water, passers-by turned to watch. It wasn’t surprising, seeing as they were two of the most unusual-looking boats on the whole canal.

  The Nightingales’ barge was nicknamed The Ark and was covered from top to bottom in paintings of animals and plants. Every few months, Mr Nightingale would repaint one section, adding new animals. The portholes were always worked into the design and were currently
an egg laid by an ostrich, a bulge in the middle of a boa constrictor and a ball on the end of a seal’s nose.

  On top of the boat, lots of vegetables grew in flowerpots, and solar panels provided the family with electricity.

  Grandad’s boat, the Molly Magee, was more old-fashioned. Dark green, with a bright red roof, it was covered in hanging baskets and brass ornaments. There was nothing on its roof except for a slightly bent TV aerial.

  As they left the marina behind, Tom’s memory of the school concert started to fade. He let out a deep sigh. Maybe it hadn’t been so bad after all. At one point he even opened his trumpet case and thought about playing one of his favourite pieces. But then he shook his head, snapped the catches back down and slid the case away under his bed.

  Instead he spent the days playing with his sister and the family pets. The Nightingales had a terrier called Rex and two cats called Max and Mindy. Tom himself had five stick insects called Hilda, Sven, Rocky, Zeus and Dolores. He’d lost track of his sister’s pets: there were definitely ferrets, rats, budgies and goldfish. At one point she’d had a couple of wounded frogs in a tank in her bedroom, but she’d nursed them back to health and released them back into the wild. His sister wanted to be a vet like their mum, so she was always doing things like that.

  By the afternoon of the first day, they had reached Perivale. Tom was standing on the rear deck, next to Sophie, who was steering the boat by gently moving a rudder left and right. Rex was leaning over the edge, peering into the water and barking at swans.

  Grandad’s boat slid along beside them. Soon he was level with them, one hand on the rudder, the other holding a large mug of tea. ‘Looking forward to seeing some elephants?’ he said.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Sophie.

  ‘When I was a young man, I spent a month watching elephants in central Africa,’ Grandad began, looking away into the distance.

  Tom and Sophie looked at their grandad and grinned. They loved hearing about his weird adventures.

  ‘I remember one day I saw a poacher creeping up on a herd. Now, poachers are the lowest of the low. They kill elephants just to get their ivory tusks. I wanted to stop him, but he had a gun and a big one at that.’

  Grandad held his hands apart to show how big the gun was.

  ‘I had to just stand there, watching this brute as he positioned himself behind a rock and took aim. But just as he was about to fire, what do you think happened? A young bull elephant sneaked up behind him and trumpeted right in his ear! The poacher dropped his gun, it went off and a bullet whipped right through his own foot, rather than in the elephant’s side! Ha ha ha! Well done, Jumbo!’

  Tom and Sophie’s eyes were wide with amazement.

  ‘See, that’s the thing about elephants,’ said Grandad. ‘Everyone thinks that because they weigh five or six tons, you can hear them coming a mile off. But they have these amazing padded feet. They can move almost silently if they want to. Now, what do we have here?’

  Grandad was pointing at a pair of wooden gates in the middle of the canal. There was another pair of wooden gates behind them, and then another and another.

  ‘It’s a staircase lock,’ he said, ‘my favourite kind. Who’s going to help me?’

  ‘Me!’ Tom and Sophie exclaimed at the same time.

  ‘You both can,’ said Grandad.

  There were lots of locks on the Grand Union Canal. They were built wherever the water was at two different levels and they allowed barges to move uphill and downhill.

  Normally, going through a lock was quite simple. You opened the gates, moved into the chamber, closed the gates, opened the paddles, the water rushed in, the barge started to rise. When you were the same level as the water on the other side of the lock, you closed the paddles, opened the other gates, and off you went.

  But sometimes one lock wasn’t enough. The hill was so steep that it took a series of locks to get your boat far enough up or down. The locks were called ‘staircase locks’ because they ended up looking like a flight of stairs. You had to open each set of gates and paddles at the right time and in the right order or you could cause a flood.

  Tom and Sophie weren’t phased though. Tom helped first, turning the windlass in one paddle after another so that all the water in all of the gates was at the right level.

  Then they were ready to climb the staircase.

  The locks were wide enough to hold two barges, so The Ark and the Molly Magee went up together.

  Sophie and her mother were in charge of the gates, opening them one at a time. Tom and Mr Nightingale stood on the deck of The Ark, holding one end of a thick rope. The other end of the rope was thrown around a pillar on the bank and helped to steady the boats when the water rushed into the lock. Grandad was doing the same on the deck of his barge. The boats were jostled back and forth, left and right, occasionally bumping into each other.

  Tom held on tightly to the rope, never letting go – no matter how much The Ark rocked.

  When at last they were at the top of the staircase, the boats sailed out of the final chamber, side by side. Sophie closed the final set of gates and she and her mother hopped back on to The Ark.

  ‘Well done, everyone!’ Mr Nightingale exclaimed. ‘Next stop, the fish and chip shop!’

  Chapter 3

  Two days later and they were there! They moored at Apsley and went to pick up the van that they had hired for the summer. Then Mr Nightingale, Mrs Nightingale, Tom and Sophie drove to Whipsnade Zoo. Grandad stayed behind at Apsley to sort out the mooring fees.

  When the Nightingales got to Whipsnade, Mr Nightingale reported for duty at the elephant house and Mrs Nightingale headed for the hospital. Tom and Sophie were free to do whatever they liked.

  They had only been to Whipsnade twice before, so everything felt new and different and exciting.

  Sophie wanted to see the white rhinos and the lions and the giraffes. They were all in the same area, so they headed to these enclosures first. They ran past the Discovery Centre and across the main lawn.

  Tom wanted to see the cheetahs. They were just behind the lions, so that was the next stop. They went the long way, through the children’s playground and over the Jumbo Express bridge.

  They both agreed on what to see after that.

  ‘Elephants,’ said Sophie, ‘my favourite animal in the world!’

  ‘What happened to snakes?’ said Tom, remembering their last adventure and their holiday in Antigua where they had introduced one of the world’s rarest snakes back into the wild.

  ‘Snakes are my joint favourite,’ Sophie said.

  They set off at a jog down towards the elephants’ field.

  ‘I hope Dad’s there,’ Sophie said. ‘He might let us feed one of the elephants.’

  ‘Or maybe one of them will squirt water at us!’ exclaimed Tom.

  ‘Or perhaps one of them will push a tree over with its head!’ Sophie suggested.

  They reached the elephants’ field and saw a keeper unloading bales of hay from a trailer. They waved at her.

  ‘We’re Ed Nightingale’s children, Tom and Sophie. We’ve come to see our dad,’ Sophie called out.

  The keeper let them into the staff area. Her name was Jane.

  Both Tom and Sophie stared at the nine huge animals padding calmly around their large field. Only a fence separated the children from the elephants.

  ‘Your dad’s in with Hina,’ Jane explained. ‘He’s giving her a manicure.’

  ‘He’s filing an elephant’s nails?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Yep,’ said Jane. ‘Go and have a look if you like.’ She nodded at the large grey barn where the elephants slept.

  Tom and Sophie ran across to the barn and ducked inside. Their dad was holding a huge file and rasping an elephant’s toenail. It couldn’t have hurt as the animal was standing patiently with its foot in the air.

  Mr Nightingale stopped filing and tapped the elephant’s front right foot, saying, ‘Hina, lift!’

  The elephant obediently pu
t her left foot down and lifted her right foot.

  ‘Are you going to put nail varnish on it too?’ Sophie joked.

  Mr Nightingale turned round and said, ‘Oh he-he-hello, you two.’ He was out of breath from all the filing. ‘A-As y-you can see, being an elephant keeper can be quite hard work!’

  ‘But what are you doing to her feet, Dad?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Well, in the wild, elephants walk for miles and miles each day, looking for food and water. This really wears their nails down. Here, of course, it’s different. Yes, we take them out for walks, but basically they spend most of their day in their enclosure. So if we didn’t file their nails down, they’d be like daggers. Or spears. OK, Hina, down you go.’

  The elephant put her foot down gently.

  ‘So is Hina an African or an Asian elephant? asked Tom.

  ‘Asian, silly,’ Sophie said with a sigh. ‘Dad’s told us this before. For a start, look at her trunk.’

  ‘OK, OK, I remember now,’ said Tom. ‘An African elephant has . . . er . . . two “fingers” on the end of its trunk.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Sophie, ‘and look, Hina’s only got one on the end of hers. Then there are her ears. An African elephant has big ears and an Asian elephant like Hina has smaller ears.’

  ‘And African elephants’ ears look like a map of Africa, don’t they?’ Tom said. ‘Asian elephants’ ears look more like a map of India.’

  ‘You got it,’ Mr Nightingale said, leading Hina back into the enclosure.

  ‘I wish human beings were like that too,’ said Tom. ‘You know, you could tell where they came from just by looking at their ears.’

  Sophie smiled and felt one of her ears with her hand.

  ‘So our ears would look like a map of England,’ Tom said, ‘and Uncle Alphonse’s ears would be in the shape of France.’

  Once Hina was back in the enclosure, Mr Nightingale, Tom and Sophie came out of the barn and walked across to where Jane was standing.