Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea (7 page)

Mrs H forgot to shut the cat up, but luckily cats aren’t as clever even as honey badgers (you’ll know what I’m talking about if you’ve read Harry’s other adventures) or maybe they’re just not as strong. Although it certainly tried, it couldn’t get the lid off the box. It scratched the outside with its claws, though, giving the centeens another awful scare. Really, it was all getting too much – they were feeling worn out. But Josie was the calmest.

“What’s going to happen to us?” George waickled. “If the hairy-yowler doesn’t get us, the Hoo-Mins will!”

“What do you think, Jgn?” asked Harry.

“I think the hairy-yowler can’t get in here. And I think the Hoo-Mins don’t want to stop us, or they would have done it by now.”

“Specially when we bit one. That’s when Hoo-Mins usually stop you, is when you bite them,” said Harry.

“All it did was yowl louder than the hairy-yowler,” said Josie, and that gave them a bit of a centi-giggle.

The cat gave up and went away. And soon afterwards the Hoo-Mins returned. The first thing they did was have a peep in the box.

“What do you think we should do with them?” Mrs H asked.

The Hoo-Min was feeling a bit better
now after whatever they’d done in the hospital. Certainly his brain must have been working.

“I’ve decided we should take them to the zoo,” he said.

“That’s a good idea,” said his mate, with relief. She’d been afraid he might want to keep them.

This is where the real good luck begins to kick in. Because if there’s one thing that zoos do not do to creatures, however creepy-crawly or poisonous, it’s stamp on them. So at least the centeens were not going to be stopped.

Not that they knew that. And even if they had had the least idea about zoos, they would have expected to be kept in some can’t-get-out for the rest of their lives.

The Hoo-Mins took the box, which now had holes punched in the lid and a lot of string around it, to the zoo.

It was a big zoo because it was in a big city. It was quite famous for its Insect House, which was for arthropods and arachnids (that’s spiders to you) and other sorts of creepy creatures as well.

The Hoo-Mins had telephoned in advance and there was a lot of excitement at the zoo. They were shown into a room in the middle of the Insect House and invited to display their prize to several experts.

As soon as the lid came off the box, there was a buzz of interest. Several huge Hoo-Min faces bent over the box for a closer look. The centeens got panicky
and ran about, and Harry raised himself threateningly, but he couldn’t reach what he would have liked to bite – one of the big noses poking down at him from above.

“But – good heavens! Is it possible? Aren’t these—”

“They can’t be! So far from—”

“They are, though, I’ll swear it! They’re—”

Then there was a great rummaging among books, a poising of magnifying glasses, a putting of heads together and a lot more Hoo-Min mouth-noises.

Our Hoo-Min – the entomologist – was soon being banged on the back and congratulated on a truly awesome find.

“What you have found,” he was excitedly told, “are three remarkable specimens of
scolopendra gigantae rara
extremis marvellosa!
One of the rarest of the giant centipedes! They were thought till recently to be extinct. We have a programme for trying to re-establish them in their native habitat. Just as soon as we can arrange it, we must fly them back to where they came from.”

“Do you know where that is?”

“Oh yes, of course we do. They come from a very limited area of – well, we can’t tell you exactly where, because it’s secret. You know there are collectors who would give anything to get hold of one of these little beauties. Centipedes, believe it or not, are becoming very popular as collectors’ items. They change hands for a great deal of money.”

“Do you mean they’re valuable?”

“Very valuable. But of course, as a scientist you wouldn’t be interested in that side of things. What satisfaction you’ll get
from restoring these rare and wonderful creatures to the wild and helping to save them from extinction!”

“Ah…yes, of course,” said the Hoo-Min, putting his bitten finger into his mouth and sucking it thoughtfully. He dared not look at Mrs H, who might not be quite sure that science was the main thing and that it didn’t matter a bit that they weren’t going to get any money.

The three centeens were put into a glass-fronted case that the zoo people had carefully lined with leaf litter, rotting wood, soil to dig in and bits of branches to crawl up. And they were supplied with the right kind of food.

Well. Not really. Even the best zoos can’t provide the mixed diet of living things that centipedes and other meat-eaters really like to hunt. They certainly didn’t know enough to give Josie any fruit. I have no doubt that our three heroes would have been deeply unhappy in the zoo, and Josie might have starved, if they’d had to stay there long.

But their centipedish luck was with them. They only had to stay in the zoo for a very short time.

They’d been in the newspapers, but they didn’t know that. What they soon noticed, though, was that many Hoo-Mins came to visit them.

They got quite used to the enormous faces peering in at them through the hard-air. I’m afraid George got to be a bit of a show-off, once he’d realised the Hoo-Mins couldn’t get at him. He would run up and down the tree branch, pose on his rear segments and click his poison-claws (“Oooh, Mummy, look, he wants to bite us!”) and twist himself into hunger-knots.

“Oh, do stop it, Grndd, you look so silly!” Harry kept saying. But George crackled, “If we have to live in this boring can’t-get-out, at least let’s have a bit of fun teasing the Hoo-Mins!”

Josie crackled nothing. She was
really
hungry, so hungry that she seriously thought of trying to stop being a no-meat-feeder, but when she tried an earwig and
then later a woodlouse, they tasted so disgusting she found she simply couldn’t. So she spent most of her time lying under some leaf litter saving her energy.

The others were very worried about her. They were worried about themselves as well. They had no idea if they were ever going to get out, and as for getting home – even Harry had despaired of that. But one happy, lucky day they were lifted out of the case on the end of a long stick-thing, packed away in a special box, and taken to an aeroplane, which flew them all the long way back to the hot tropical country they had come from. No, I can’t tell you which it was, either, because I
don’t want collectors coming along looking for them. Some of these people don’t care
what
becomes extinct, so long as they have a specimen of it.

When the centeens got there, there was a little ceremony among the Hoo-Mins because they were so pleased to have three of this rare kind of centipede to return to the wild. And then the centeens were released.

Harry and George knew at once that they were not far from their dear home-tunnel. They were two very excited and happy centeens.

Only one thought threatened to spoil the great happiness Harry felt. Can you guess what it was?

Yes, of course. They’d been away for such a long time. He was very much afraid that Belinda wouldn’t be there to welcome them home.

They couldn’t find the home-tunnel at first. It seemed to have lost its special smell somehow, and that disturbed both Harry and George a lot, though neither of them said anything to the other. It should have smelt strongly of home, and of Belinda, but it didn’t. They only found it because of other smells nearby that hadn’t changed.

“Here it is! Here it is!” crackled Harry at last, and dived down the entrance with George just behind him. Josie stayed in
the no-top world and waited. It’s very bad centi-manners to enter another centipede’s home unless you’re asked. Harry was rushing down the tunnel so fast that he wasn’t feelering where he was going. He actually crashed into something head first, and all his segments kind of squashed into each other like a concertina.

George then ran into the back of Harry and they got all tangled up.

“It’s blocked!” crackled Harry. “Some earth’s fallen down! Mama—”

George twisted himself straight. Without a crackle he got in front of Harry and began to dig.

“That’s why it didn’t smell right,” he muttackled. “The home-smell couldn’t get out.”

“Is the fall very bad?”

“It’s not new. The earth’s packed tight.”

“Let me dig!” crackled Harry frantically. He tried to crawl on top of George to dig where he was digging, but there was no room. He backed off and stood behind George. If centipedes could dance with impatience, he would have danced.

“Why didn’t she dig herself out? Why didn’t she—” He broke off as he remembered something. “Grndd! Stop. There’s an other-way-out tunnel! Let’s try that.”

The two centeens had to back out – there was no room to turn. As their back
ends, and then the rest of them, emerged one after the other, they found Josie waiting for them.

“Is the one you warm-heart all right?” she asked at once.

Harry couldn’t crackle. George said, “There’s been an earth-fall. We have to find another way into the nest. While we do, would you mind going down there and digging? In case the other way is blocked, too.”

“Yes, I can do that,” said Josie. She could sense that Harry was in a bad way, and she rubbed his head with hers in crackle-less sympathy, even though she’d said she didn’t know about warm-heart. Actually, if anyone had asked her, she might not have been so sure of it now. “Don’t worry, you’ll find her,” she whisperckled.

Then she ran down the tunnel. The other two started questing about on the
no-top-world. They’d both used the other-way-out tunnel a few times, mostly when they were playing, but not for ages and they weren’t at all sure where it came out. They were trying to find Belinda’s scent. They couldn’t. They hunted for it for a long, long time. Harry was beginning to feel quite desperate, when they sensed Josie’s signal.

“Over here!”

They both rushed over to her. Her head was sticking out of a hole under a lot of dead leaves and rotting stuff.

“I got through the earth-fall, and then I just ran through your nest and found this other-way-out tunnel. It isn’t blocked, you can go right down.”

Harry stood still. He dared not ask.

“Was – was there any – centipede – down there? In the nest?” It was George who found his crackle first.

“Well – no – only a stopped one.”

There was a terrible crackle-lessness.

George recovered first.

“Wait here, Hx.”

He ran down the other-way-out tunnel. Josie stayed with Harry.

Harry was lying flat on the ground. His feelers were drooping as far as they could go. His whole body felt limp with misery.

His mama must have stopped. Down there in their empty nest all alone. It was too awful. It was
too awful.

George shot out of the hole.

“It’s not her, Hx!”

Harry stood up. “Not her?”

“There’s an empty cuticle down there. But it’s not her. It’s not long enough to be her. Some other one of us must have gone down there and stopped. She’s not there.” Harry was stiff with hope. He waved his feelers in all directions.

“So she must have left our nest. She probably went hunting for us. She’s done that before when we didn’t come home. We must find her!”

Thus the big search started.

When you’re desperate for help, you’ll take it from anything or anyone, and Harry’s view of his fellow creatures
quickly changed. When he met one, no matter how tasty, he didn’t look on it as prey, but as a possible helper in his search for his mother. It was like when he’d once made friends –
friends!
– with a lady dung-beetle. Or when he had learnt to talk to a tarantula, though that hadn’t been friendly at all. Not to mention the bare-tail.

Now he used his skill at signalling to other species. Every creature, large or small, that he met, he asked, as best he could, if they’d seen a big-female-one-like-him. None of them had, or else they just didn’t get it. Or else they ran away fast, and didn’t even try to understand him.

George and Josie, who had no gift for languages, just ran around looking. Only George knew Belinda’s scent, so Josie kept close to him.

Harry went his own way. He refused to give in to tiredness or hunger. He saw a rhinoceros beetle and gave chase. It ran away from him, but he ran faster. He got in front of it.

“I’m not hunting!” he signalled. The beetle stood still, scared and puzzled, its horn lowered just like a real rhinoceros. Harry struggled to form a signal in beetle, a language that always rhymes. It was very hard – he wasn’t that good.

“You see – like me? Left behind, now can’t find. If you know, you show – and I’ll never hunt you!” All right, the last bit
doesn’t rhyme at all, but it seemed Harry got his message across. He saw a gleam of understanding in the beetle’s tiny eyes. It set off at a slow amble. Harry came after it. He wasn’t sure if it was leading him somewhere or just going about its business. Either way, Harry was half-stopped with impatience. He began to run around it in circles, trying to hurry it up, but it was a rather old rhinoceros beetle. It couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hurry.

It walked a long way. Harry could hardly bear the suspense.

At last it stopped by a hole – an entrance.

“One went there, that’s its lair,” it signalled.

Harry feelered the air. Yes! YES! He could smell her! She was down there! His little heart soared with relief.

“Thank you, pank you, mank you!” he burbackled to the beetle. If he’d been a
Hoo-Min, he’d have kissed it right on its horn.

It looked a bit puzzled, as well it might. But it got the message.

“Done my best. You do the rest.” As Harry started down the tunnel, the old beetle followed him with a last signal: “Don’t forget! That we met!” This was its way of reminding Harry to keep his promise never to hunt it. (I’m happy to tell you that of course Harry did. And didn’t. In fact, he never stopped another rhinoceros beetle, just in case.)

Harry raced down the tunnel. She was alive! She was here!

He forgot the others – he forgot everything. His mama was waiting for him!

He rounded a bend in the tunnel and it opened into a typical centi-nest. And there she was – Belinda – Bkvlbbchk – his mama.

She was lying under a faded, dried-out
leaf. She looked terribly old and
almost
Dried-Out herself.

As he came near, his feelers swivelling with excitement and happiness, she raised her head.

“Who is it?” she crackled faintly.

“It’s me, Mama. I’m back.”

“Hx? My Hxzltl? My very own dear centi?” She crawled out weakly from under the leaf and circled him, touching him now and then with wondering feelers. He could see she couldn’t walk very well. When she got to his rear end, she exclaimeckled: “Hx – you’ve lost three of your legs!”

“Don’t worry about that, Mama! They’ll grow again when I next shed my cuticle.”

“But how did you lose them?”

“It’s a long, long story, Mama.”

“Tell it to me. Oh, tell it to me!”

“Of course I will! Only I have to let the others know we’re here.”

“Others? Grnddjl is back, too?”

“Yes, and a centeena we met called Jgnblm. You’ll like her, Mama, and she’ll like you.”

“Oh, please, don’t go away again yet! I’ve missed you so much!”

He gave her a centi-kiss, stroking her old head gently with his feelers.

“Don’t worry, Mama. I promise I’ll never leave you again.”