by Lynne Jonell
“We didn’t mean to.” Abner jammed his hands in his pockets. He nervously rolled lint and crumbs between his fingers—and then he stopped. “I know something you might want,” he said slowly.
The Great Hamster sniffed. “I doubt it.”
Abner brought his hand out of his pocket. In his palm was a half-chewed dog biscuit.
The Great Hamster’s nose quivered. She slid down the tree root to the ground.
Abner held out his hand. “Try it,” he coaxed. “Just take a little taste.”
“It looks like a piece of wet cardboard.” The Great Hamster closed her eyes, swaying a little. “But it smells—”
“Delicious?” suggested Abner. He moved his hand a little closer. “Scrumptious? Too yummy to resist?”
The hamster leaned forward and took a small nibble.
“Oh, my.” Her paws fluttered before her furry chest, and she gazed at the dog biscuit in awe.
“It’s Woofies,” said Abner. “The very best kind.”
There was a sound like a strangled bark as the Great Hamster lunged forward. Soft, fuzzy jowls pressed against Abner’s fingers as she mouthed the doggy treat and settled down to a blissful crunching.
“I can get you some more,” said Abner.
The hamster swallowed, licked her whiskers, and looked up. “More?”
Abner turned his head. An excited babble of squeaking voices grew louder, and Celia appeared again, surrounded by leaping small rodents. They were mostly chipmunks and gophers, as far as Abner could see, and they seemed upset.
“Listen!” Celia held up her paws. “Of course I always win. I’m the fastest—what do you expect?”
An eruption of squeaks filled the air.
“I can’t help it if I’m the biggest!” Celia reared back, her whiskers quivering.
More squeaks. Much waving of paws.
Celia listened, her head lowered. “Oh, all right. Let’s play something different, then. How about capture-the-acorn? You can have more on your team.…”
They moved off, their shrill voices fading. Abner turned back to the Great Hamster, who was licking her paws to get the last tiny crumbs.
“I know where there are lots more dog biscuits,” Abner said. “And I can bring them tonight, if you turn my sister back.”
“Oh … oh, dear …” The Great Hamster’s delicate paws combed her cheek fur and scrubbed her ears. “I don’t know if it will work. I just don’t know. It’s not really a hamster wish, to turn into a human—not usually, anyway. I’m sure the rest of the burrowers feel the same. But perhaps all together …”
“Just try it,” urged Abner. “I’ll bring the whole bag of Woofies if you promise to try your best.”
The Great Hamster tapped her claws together. “Very well. But if it works, I want you to promise me something, too.”
“What?”
The Great Hamster leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
Abner looked at her for a moment. It was not a promise he wanted to make.
“Okay,” he said, sighing.
“And what about those others?” The Great Hamster nodded at Tate and Derek, still fast asleep on the sand. “Can you speak for them, too?”
“Yes.” Abner looked at his sister and brother. They would agree. And if they didn’t, he’d just have to make them understand.
“All right, then.” The Great Hamster scampered down from the tree root and onto Abner’s knee. “Let them sleep. It will take me most of the night to gather the burrowers. And in the meantime—”
Abner nodded. “I’ll get the Woofies.”
CHAPTER 6
Out of Time
The burrowers stood lined up in rows, small to large. Rabbits and woodchucks were at the back. Gophers, hamsters, and chipmunks came next. And the tiny moles and meadow mice were in front. They looked soberly at Celia, lying asleep in a fat, furry bunch among the tree roots, and then at her brothers and sister watching anxiously from the sidelines. Abner clutched the bag of Woofies and held the chewed corner shut.
“Ready?” said the Great Hamster, raising her paws like a conductor. “And—begin!”
The burrowers screwed up their eyes and flattened their ears. Paws tightened and whiskers trembled.
But Celia stayed a hamster.
“Up one more notch!” called the Great Hamster, and the burrowers tried even harder. Cheeks puffed out and hind feet thumped.
“There!” Tate pointed. “Is something changing?”
“I don’t see it,” said Derek after a pause.
“It’s only the light,” said Abner heavily. He looked to the east, where the sun was just lifting above the trees, and his shoulders slumped. His parents would be getting up soon, and Celia was still a hamster.
“I don’t dare tell them to increase the magic,” said the Great Hamster. “It’s almost too much even now.”
“The rabbits do look a little faint,” said Tate.
“Maybe it takes a while to have an effect?” suggested the Great Hamster. “I don’t really know. We’ve never tried to reverse a wish like this before.”
Abner nodded, but without hope. They had run out of time. He tucked the bag of Woofies dog biscuits among the tree roots and backed away. “We’ve got to get home,” he said. “Thank you for trying.”
But Celia proved impossible to wake up. She lay in a soft, fuzzy heap, her head pillowed on her paws and her sides moving in and out with her breath.
“She was awake enough last night,” said Derek. “She never stopped running.”
“That’s why she’s so tired now,” Tate said. “Hamsters stay up at night and sleep during the day. But Celia was a girl yesterday, not a hamster, and so she didn’t sleep then, either.”
“We’ll have to carry her.” Abner said this with a sigh, for he was tired, too. He’d been awake all night, and hurt his shoulder and twisted his knee. But what was weighing him down most of all was the problem of how to tell their parents about Celia.
Their path back was all uphill. Stumbling, dirty, and still in their pajamas, the three children worked their way slowly through the dunes and up the road, carrying Celia between them. She was pudgy, with short little legs, and hard to get a grip on. More than once she almost slipped.
They stopped over and over again to get a firmer hold, and staggered on. “Almost—there,” gasped Tate as they neared their front door. “Just a few—more feet.”
But they had forgotten about the stairs. Inside, they looked up the long flight of steps to the second-floor landing, and knew there was another flight beyond that.
They had decided to try to keep Celia a secret for one more day. Abner didn’t really believe that they would find a way to change her back. But he wanted to put off explanations for just a little while longer. He was too tired to face it all right now.
Bumping, slipping, grabbing for the banister, they dragged the dead weight of Celia up to the second-floor landing, but there they dropped to the floor.
“I can’t,” whispered Tate, almost crying. “Not one more step.”
Derek, collapsed in a heap, moaned in agreement.
Abner slumped against the wall, catching his breath. Down the hall, behind their parents’ bedroom door, there was a noise of bedsprings and then a shuffling of feet.
The sound gave the children a last spurt of energy. “We’ll roll her,” Abner said, low and urgent. The three got on their knees and began to push the big hamster up, step by step.
Halfway, the energy left them as suddenly as it had come. Derek had hardly pushed past the second step anyway, and Tate had petered out, too. Abner turned and braced himself against the limp and sleeping hamster, who seemed to grow heavier every moment. “Come on,” he said hoarsely. “Help me—I can’t hold her up alone.”
Feet jammed against wall and banister, Derek, Tate, and Abner pressed their backs against Celia’s warm, soft body to keep her from falling. They were in shadow, and it was possible that their parents might head straight to the kitchen fo
r their coffee and never look up.
And at first it seemed that it might happen. Father headed straight downstairs, fumbling for the light switch and missing it. But Mother’s slippers made a gritty noise on the landing, and she looked down at the floor, and then up.
“What on earth?” Still in her robe, she stared up at her children. “How in the world did you get so filthy? Just look at your pajamas! And there’s sand all over the landing!”
Abner looked at the others. Faces smudged, pajamas torn, and with twigs in their hair, Derek and Tate looked as if they had spent the night outside. Which they had.
The three children gazed silently down at their mother. There didn’t seem to be anything useful to say.
“We went out,” said Abner at last. He waited hopelessly for her to discover that her youngest child was a hamster of unusual size.
“Is that Celia behind you? Don’t tell me you took her outside in her pajamas, too?” Mother swept up the stairs and stopped in front of the children. “Move aside, you three. I’ll speak to you later.”
Wordlessly, Abner, Tate, and Derek moved. Their mother gasped.
“She’s even filthier than the rest of you!” Bending down, Mother lifted Celia in her arms and stamped up the stairs. “I suppose I should be grateful that she’s still in her play clothes from yesterday, but does this mean that she never put on pajamas at all? Into the tub with you, one after the other. And you’ll put on clean clothes and sweep up all the sand before any of you have breakfast!”
The three children stood looking up at Celia, who hung over her mother’s shoulder—blond-haired, blue-eyed, fully human, and as dirty as they had ever seen her.
“She changed!” cried Tate. “You changed, Celia!”
Derek whooped. “The Great Hamster was right—it just took time!”
Abner thumped up the stairs behind Mother, in unbelieving joy. He took hold of Celia’s hand, which dangled over her mother’s arm—skin, not fur! It was real!—and gave it a shake.
Celia smiled at her big brother. “Don’t be mad, Mom,” she said. “They took good care of me. And I had a lot of fun playing hamster.”
CHAPTER 7
Lucky Willows
The children were busy all morning.
They swept up the sand and suffered their scolding. They took baths, one after the other. And they even did extra chores, to show they were sorry. So after lunch, Mrs. Willow said that they had done enough and could play.
But all they wanted to do was sleep.
“Let’s take a nap,” said Tate when Mother had gone.
Derek put his head down on the table. “I vote we nap right here.”
“I’m not that sleepy,” said Celia.
“Easy for you to say,” mumbled Derek. “You slept the whole time we carried you.”
Abner yawned so widely, his eyes watered. “We’d better go to our rooms so the parents won’t see us sleeping. They would wonder what we had been doing all night.”
“That would be hard to explain,” Tate said. She pulled Derek to his feet and herded him up the stairs.
But when they got to the third floor, they did not go straight to their beds. Instead, they stood at the window, looking out. Over the large and scrubby yard, past the line of trees, they could see the gleam of the river. Near it was a curving, pale line that might have been the top of a sand dune.
“We’ll have to keep the promise I made, now,” said Abner.
Tate nodded. “The burrowers did turn Celia back into a girl again. It’s the least we can do.”
“It’s too bad, though,” said Derek wistfully. “I wanted to make a wish for myself.”
“What did you promise?” asked Celia. She had been sleeping for that part.
Abner breathed on a smudged pane of glass and polished it with his shirttail. “We all promised—that means you, too, Celia—never to ask another burrower for a wish.”
“Never?” Celia asked. “Not even a little wish?”
Abner shook his head. “We’re just lucky it all turned out the way it did.” His eyes strayed to the empty hamster cage. They would never get a dog now, for their parents thought they had lost another hamster. But still, Abner felt lucky.
Derek gazed out the window. “With all that magic coming up from the ground, though, don’t you think there might be more out there, on Hollowstone Hill?”
“Maybe,” said Tate.
“I hope so,” said Celia.
“I wonder what kind?” said Abner.
The End
About the Author
Lynne Jonell is the author of the popular Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat, a Booklist Editors’ Choice and one of School Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year, as well as The Secret of Zoom and seven picture books. Although she doesn’t really care for rats, hamsters, or any kind of rodent at all, she still keeps writing about them. Please don’t ask her why. She doesn’t understand it herself.
