It is good to be friendly with these little people. Willigumble was, and very soon he had an army of ants and bees, birds, cicadas, frogs and spiders helping him by keeping an eye open as they went about their work, but none of them saw anything that looked like the lost tink.
‘Whew! The bush is a big place,’ said Willigumble, after he had been searching for a long time without success. ‘And we’re not even sure what the tink looks like. I’d better have a rest and a think.’ He sat on an old spring mattress in the rubbish, far enough from the Bottersnikes to be safe. The cover was quite rotten and he fell in amongst the springs and the things that happen in old mattresses, but it did not matter. Willigumble settled in the coil of a spring and bounced lightly to help him think things over.
‘Now I’m out,’ he thought, ‘and the rest are in — tins, that is. They can’t get out and I’m not strong enough to pull them out. Tinkingumble’s lost his tink and it can’t be found, and if they don’t escape soon, by tink or by think, there’ll be all that horrible work to do for the King’s Party. This is serious. Very serious.’
There came a loud laugh from a branch above his head. ‘Hahahahahohohohohaha!’ Kookaburra, of course.
‘Lovely day,’ remarked the bird to Willigumble. ‘What are you doing down there?’
‘I’m thinking how serious it is.’
‘Ar, it doesn’t do to think,’ said Kookaburra. ‘Bad for the brain. That’s the trouble with you ground creatures. Too much thinking, not enough flying. Look at those Bottersnikes now — what do they think they’re doing, cooped up in their pots and pans on a lovely day like this?’
‘They think it’s going to rain,’ said Willigumble.
‘Hahahahahoho! Rain? On a day like this? This is the sort of day that makes you glad to be a bird,’ Kookaburra said. ‘Why, it’s spring in the air today!’
‘What’s that?’ said Willigumble, bouncing higher.
‘What’s the matter with you? I said spring’s in the air. Can’t you feel it?’
‘Grasshoppers!’ shouted Willigumble. ‘Spring. In the air. I believe you’re right! Help me, please, Kookaburra, with your strong beak,’ and he did a very strange thing for a Gumble. He began pulling the old mattress to bits.
‘Everybody’s mad!’ said Kookaburra.
With the help of the astonished bird Willigumble had stripped the rotting cover from the mattress and laid bare the springs when they heard shouting and snuffle-nose noises from the Bottersnikes, and saw smoke rising.
‘Have they started a bushfire?’ Willigumble asked anxiously.
It wasn’t a bushfire. It was Chank’s roof. Chank had got angry waiting for the rain that didn’t rain and his straw hat had caught alight from his red-hot ears.
Chank was extremely angry when he saw that his beautiful roof was smouldering, and the angrier he became the hotter the fire flared. The other Bottersnikes stood giving good advice but they did not do anything to put the fire out.
‘It must be cosy in there with a nice fire,’ Snorg said.
‘But you should have a chimney to let the smoke out,’ said Glob.
‘Keep still, Chank, while we cook a bit of toast,’ and they snuffled in high glee.
Slightly overheated now, Chank started running about madly. He could not see where he was going — how those fat Bottersnikes hopped when Chank and his blazing top-knot came blundering among them. This part, they thought, was not so funny, and the King was not at all amused because Chank was coming near his car.
‘What’s that idiot doing running around on fire?’ he roared. ‘Sit on his head!’
The Bottersnikes blinked at this because Chank’s head was obviously too hot to sit on, but the King was angry and not to be put off.
‘But King, we can’t —’ they said.
‘Yes you can,’ he bawled. ‘If he’s got a head it can be sat on, so sit on it, hard, and don’t argue.’
‘We’ll get burned!’
‘I don’t care,’ the King screamed. ‘If somebody doesn’t sit on his head in less than no time I won’t have a birthday when it stops raining, and there’ll be no King’s Party.’
This would never do. The Bottersnikes hurried to their jam tins and let the Gumbles go with orders to put the fire out quick smart so that Chank could have his head sat on. The Gumbles were glad to be out of the tins at last and made a great show as firefighters.
First they tripped Chank up by thrusting a stick between his legs. The straw hat had nearly burned away by now but somehow — no one quite knew how — the fire spread alarmingly.
A patch of dry bladey grass exploded into flames. Billows of vile smoke went up from an old bag that caught alight. Gumbles, rushing about with hoses, tackled the job manfully, but seemed to be making the fire worse. The hoses would keep getting wound round the Bottersnikes’ legs. Many a tail was scorched, accidentally. And the noise! There was a wailing from the roofless Chank and yelping from the owners of scorched tails, while the fire was roaring and the King was roaring and smoke made everyone cough. Altogether there was far more smoke, sparks, shouting and confusion than when the Gumbles were safely in their jam tins.
At last the King made his voice heard above the uproar: ‘Them Gumbles ain’t doing any good! Put ’em in their jam tins and squash ’em down hard!’ So the Bottersnikes grabbed the Gumblefiremen and groped through the smoke for the tins. They popped them in and squashed them down most savagely but instead of flattening out like lumps of dough as they were supposed to, the Gumbles came shooting out of their tins as if on springs. This was not so surprising. They were on springs. Willigumble and Kookaburra had put a mattress spring in each tin while everyone was busy with the fire.
The Gumbles held on to the springs with their toes and went zoinng! zoinng! over the heads of the startled Bottersnikes like rubber kangaroos. The Bottersnikes were too amazed to do anything except rub their smoke-filled eyes and watch the Gumbles zoinnging down the hill into the bush.
Willigumble was bouncing along on a spring of his own.
‘Sorry we can’t —’ zoinng! — ‘stay for the King’s Party —’ zoinng! — he shouted, ‘But we have to —’ zoinng! — ‘go now. Spring’s in the air, you know!’ and he bounced after the others as fast as he could zoinng.
Bottersnikes eat pictures of food in papers and magazines. There are plenty of these in rubbish heaps — that’s partly why they are so fat. Also they eat the stuffing out of mattresses. This they like fried. For sweets they are fond of rusty nails, though their favourites are milk-bottle tops, which they chew like chewing gum. They will eat earwigs and cardboard too, but only if they are hungry.
So the Gumbles had to go through all the rubbishy papers carefully cutting out the food pictures. They had to search the junk heaps from end to end for bottle tops and rusty nails and, worst of all, they had to carry in the stuffing from four mattresses and pile it ready for frying. The Bottersnikes yelled at them all day long.
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