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  Skeema and Mimi managed to mumble something and Uncle, bursting with joy and pride, gathered them all into his arms.

  “Hear, hear,” said Little Dream, politely. “Good speech. Welcome to the Really Mads.”

  Chapter 3

  “Now, come along, everyone!” Uncle cried. “That’s enough talk! With the rains so late, we need to save lots of energy just to find enough to eat. Tails up then, Really Mads, and let’s head for the foraging grounds!”

  Off they raced, dipping in and out of the dry tufts of spiky grass splashed with the stinky white tell-tale scent marks of hyenas. “Eyes sharp!” barked Uncle Fearless. “Stay together to stay alive! Don’t be fooled just because hyenas giggle. The louder they laugh, the hungrier they are.” So everyone was extra watchful as they came to open ground near a lofty camelthorn tree.

  “I’ll take first sentry-duty!” cried Mimi in a huffy sort of voice. She darted up to the top of the tree like a monkey and scanned the horizon for signs of trouble. “Why I should look out for HER, I really don’t know,” she muttered under her breath.

  With Mimi on guard, the others could put their heads down and dig, but the pickings were slim. Before the rains came, food was always scarce. The damp places, where the juiciest bugs and lizards and scorpions love to cool themselves, lay far below the surface and were hard to sniff out.

  Skeema was chasing ants, throwing up a shower of hot sand to get at some of their eggs, when he suddenly came face to face with a crawler he hadn’t met before. It was a shiny, black beetle with white marks on its cheeks. It seemed to be eating the ants itself and was waving its long legs and pincers in a wild sort of way. Skeema was very fond of his food, especially scorpions, so he was used to the darting and threatening tricks that many delicious creatures use to try to avoid getting eaten. In fact, the sheer boldness of the little creature made him determined to find out what it tasted like. He lowered his nose almost to the ground to get within nibbling range. Then he began to knock the beetle around with his paw.

  Crack-crack! The creature let out a double explosion from its back end! It sent twin streams of acid flying right at Skeema’s eye! With a yelp and a backward roll, Skeema flung himself away from the danger. But in a couple of seconds, he was nose down and back in the hunt.

  “Careful now!” warned Uncle. “Black-and-white stranger—always a danger! I’ve told you that before. That’s an Oogpister you’re playing with, by all that stinks and stings! He’ll do real damage to your eyes if you let him! Give him some respect!”

  “Respect!” muttered Skeema to the little squirt, thinking how clever it was and that, if ever he found himself cornered, a quick Oogpister move might come in handy.

  When it was Skeema’s turn to keep watch, Mimi came down from her perch to feed. She was still very grumpy and complained to Little Dream, “I’m not hungry at all, and it’s all Uncle’s fault!”

  She was dreadfully jealous. Instead of giving her lots of attention, Uncle seemed to be more or less ignoring her. He kept fussing over Radiant, offering her the best grubs and crawlers, no matter how difficult they were to find.

  Mimi stamped around in a sulk, scratching at the increasingly hot sand and throwing it up in clouds when she could find nothing to eat.

  Radiant noticed what was going on and trotted over to her with a fat bug between her jaws—a rare find in this dry season and one of Mimi’s favorites. “Here,” she said kindly. “You have it. You’ve done a lovely job as lookout. You must be starving, you poor thing.”

  But Mimi was in a shocking temper by now. “I am not poor and I am not your anything!” she announced.

  “Oh, right. Fine.” said Radiant, trying her best to pretend that she wasn’t deeply hurt by this outburst, “I was only going to give you a tip about finding some juice when things are frightfully dry, that’s all. I stumbled upon this little trick on my wanderings. Let me show you. What you do is, you find a shrub. Doesn’t matter how fresh-looking it is. You figure out where its roots might be running to and then you dig quite deep…”

  “I know where to dig,” said Mimi with a haughty sniff. “Leave me alone.”

  “Now look here,” said Radiant kindly but firmly. “Adults are not always right, but they sometimes have valuable experience that’s worth passing on. Kits should pay attention to adults. That’s how they learn. That’s the Meerkat Way.”

  “I want Uncle to teach me the Meerkat Way, not a stranger!”

  Radiant nudged the bug with her nose. “You’re hungry,” she said. “You’re upset. I suggest you eat this. It’ll make you feel better. But I’m officially a member of this tribe now, too, so I think you should make an effort to be a little more respectful to me.”

  And with that she turned and made her way back to the burrow, obviously rather shaken.

  Uncle trotted over. “Radiant, my dear!” he called. “Is anything the matter? Are you all right? Wait up, what-what!” And he scampered after her.

  *

  Little Dream and Skeema walked over to Mimi, who was standing on her own, looking very angry.

  “It’s true what Radiant says about meerkats needing to look out for one another, Mimi,” said Little Dream. “Stay together to stay alive, remember?” he said, reciting the mob’s motto.

  “Then Uncle should be staying together with us then!” sniffed Mimi, beginning to cry, “Not running around after females.”

  Little Dream was anxious to comfort her. “Yes, but he did help us escape from our birth-burrow, and we all hated that, didn’t we?” he said. “And he brought us safely across to this lovely spot on the far side of the Upworld!”

  “Well said, Dreamy!” agreed Skeema. “No more bowing and scraping to nasty Queen Heartless and her horrid kits! We got away from her—and we have Uncle to thank for that!” He gave his Snap-snap a squeeze and it squeaked loudly and defiantly.

  “Good, old Uncle!” cried Little Dream. “And when you come to think of it, what happened to Radiant is just like what happened to Mama, isn’t it?” he went on. “I mean to say, it’s like when Queen Heartless got jealous of Mama and chased her out of the burrow, isn’t it?”

  Little Dream had worked himself up by now. “I feel sure Mama’s still alive!” he declared. “She’s become a wanderer like Radiant used to be. It’s horrible to think of her all alone in the desert with no one to help her keep watch for enemies!” His eyes grew wide and full of tears.

  Skeema decided that a quick play-fight might cheer his little brother up a bit. “Come on, Dreamie,” he said fondly. “Let’s not go over all that again.” And he wrestled him a couple of times and chewed a tick off his ear, for luck.

  Chapter 4

  The following day, Warm-up started as a very frosty affair. Mimi still refused to speak to Radiant, so as soon as his tummy-pad started getting toasty, Uncle tried to smooth things over by being extra cheery.

  “Well, I must say I slept like a baby!” he bellowed. “I feel as frisky as a dung beetle in a warthog wallow. What about you, Radiant, my dear? Was there plenty of spring in the nesting material in the spare chamber?”

  “Yes, I thank you, Your Royal Highness-and-Lowness!” said Radiant, chuckling. “Never slept better in my life.”

  “Now, now, no titles, no titles, or I shall have to start calling you Princess again!” said Uncle. “And how about you, kits? Mimi? Skeema? Are you refreshed?”

  “Well, at least you weren’t talking in your sleep again, Uncle,” said Skeema teasingly. “But I must say, Dreamy was horribly wriggly.”

  They all looked over at Little Dream, who was swaying from side to side, then suddenly, without warning, fell flat on his nose, fast asleep again.

  Skeema helped him up. “I’m not surprised you’re so tired,” he said, giving him a dust-down. “What’s up? Were you having a nightmare or something?”

  “Sorry,” said Little Dream, rubbing his nose. “I thought I heard Mama again. She was calling out. She kept saying: Come and find me! Bring me home! Follow the pawp
rints! And I ran and I ran and I looked and I looked and for a long time there was just sand. Then, I found some prints leading far away… and then I woke up.”

  “Never mind, boy! Nothing to worry about. It was only a dream,” said Uncle, giving him a squeeze. “Let’s go out hunting, eh? Give ourselves a good shake-up! That’ll put us right as reptiles, what-what!”

  “You poor little thing,” said Radiant, with real emotion. “You must miss your mother terribly.”

  “What about me, me?” cried Mimi, breaking her sulky silence. “I miss her as well, you know!”

  “Of course you do,” said Radiant quickly. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Now, Mimi!” snapped Uncle. “I won’t have this constant rudeness to our newest member! You must start thinking about others, don’t you know!”

  “Uncle,” said Skeema, anxious to avoid a nasty argument, “about Mama… On the night that Queen Heartless made her leave the burrow, are you absolutely certain that she died?”

  “Well, I, I hardly know how to answer you, my boy,” said Uncle. “I really think we should try to move on. We all miss Fragrant, of course we do. Your mama was one of the finest females among the Sharpeyes, one of the bravest and most tender. But we have to face facts, yes—yes? When Heartless expelled your mama from her birth-burrow, there were wild dogs around. And jackals, too. I heard them myself, yapping for blood. I’m afraid that she had very little chance of escaping them all, not by herself.”

  Little Dream was suddenly so alert that he was quivering. “You said very little chance, Uncle. You didn’t say there was no chance.”

  “But, my dear Dreamie…”

  “Were the wild dogs and jackals close by the burrow or far away?” said Little Dream, pressing on.

  “I honestly can’t say,” said Uncle. “I was deep below the ground in the nursery chamber, being a babysitter to you kits.”

  “Aha!” exclaimed Little Dream. “If you were deep down, how could you be sure?”

  “What I’m saying, dear boy, is that there were certainly some pretty fearsome brutes on the loose when your poor mama was chased out into the Upworld. I simply don’t see how it would have been possible for her—for any lone meerkat—to defend herself against a ruthless and cunning pack.”

  “Your uncle’s right, you know,” added Radiant gently. “But I’m sure she didn’t suffer. The end would have come very quickly. That’s something, isn’t it?”

  Uncle was visibly touched by her support. He cleared his throat. “Harrumph! Come along now, everyone. We need action! Ready for your breakfast? I must say, I’m very anxious to show Radiant our foraging-ground over by Kudu Ridge. Are you all set? Best paws forward and off we go, then! Yip-yip! Tally-ho!”

  “Tally-ho!” cried Radiant. “I could eat an aardvark!”

  She and Uncle skipped ahead, looking back encouragingly at the kits every now and then, playfully bumping into each other as they went. Skeema and Mimi followed behind them glumly, but looking forward to breakfast, at least.

  Little Dream, however, was still lagging behind.

  “Come on, Dreamie,” said Skeema. “Let’s go and dig up something wiggly!”

  “You go ahead,” he told his brother and sister, his eyes shining. “I’m going to find Mama!”

  And with that, he scrambled up the steep side of the sand dune that towered above the well-trodden path to the foraging grounds. He reached the top and gazed down at the chain of salt pans that stretched away to the west beyond the dry riverbed like huge, dark lily pads.

  “Wait for me! Me! I’m coming with you! I won’t stay here a moment longer with that dreadful female!” Mimi declared and scrambled after him.

  Skeema was alarmed. “Where are you going? Stay together to stay alive, remember?” he warned. And just to underline the point, at that moment, a martial eagle flapped from its perch high in a tree.

  Distracted as he was by the delightful company of his lively new female friend, and in spite of having only one eye, Uncle was quick to see the danger and to sound the alert. “TAKE COVER, EVERYONE! DIVE! DIVE! DIVE!” he ordered, and in a flurry of dust, wrestled Radiant into the nearest bolt hole.

  For a moment Skeema ran around like a cornered squirrel, not knowing where to turn. “Wup-wup! Look out, Little Dream! Stop, Mimi!” he urged. But Mimi and Little Dream were out of sight, over the ridge. Seeing that Uncle and Radiant were safely underground, and praying that the eagle’s attention was not on him, he dashed after his brother and sister as fast as terror and legs could move him, his brave tail waving like a flag.

  Chapter 5

  When Skeema caught up with Little Dream and Mimi, they were standing at the margin of a gray and dried-out salt pan, gazing out at a grass-covered rocky hill in the distance that rose up out of the desert sands.

  “Like a green island,” muttered Little Dream, in a daze. Then, casting his eyes downward, he noticed some marks that had been newly pressed into the dark crust beneath them. They made a line into the distance as far as even meerkat eyes could see. “Pawprints!” he exclaimed, looking up at the others. “Just like in my dream!”

  “These aren’t Mama’s prints,” panted Skeema. “They can’t be.” He lowered his head and sniffed. “These are enemy pawprints—a cat’s, by the looks of them.” He sniffed again. “Small enough to be a cheetah’s or a leopard’s… but no, a lion’s I think. He’s not a big one, but big enough to have all of us for breakfast, anyway.”

  “But these are the same pawprints from my dream, I’m sure of it! Maybe he’s carrying Mama off somewhere to eat her?” cried Little Dream. “We’ve no time to lose!”

  “This is ridiculous!” complained Skeema. “You’re letting your imagination run away with you!”

  But Little Dream paid no attention. He dashed off again, the salty crust crackling under his paws. Mimi and Skeema shook their heads in disbelief, but scrambled after him anyway.

  As the sun rose in the sky, the Upworld began to shimmer in the growing heat. Having tracked the pawprints all morning, the meerkats suddenly noticed that they had stopped going in a straight line, drifting off first to the left, then to the right. “Whoever’s been leaving these tracks must have been getting tired,” muttered Skeema. On they went, and more than once the prints went around in a circle. But then the pawprints steadied, and eventually led the little band of meerkats straight to the green island they had spotted in the distance earlier. Then the pawprints disappeared.

  “Now what do we do?” panted Mimi. “This lion—or whatever it is that we’ve been following—he could be hiding around here somewhere. Suppose he pounces on me!”

  “On us,” said her brother wearily. “And, I’m sorry, Dreamie, but I really don’t see the point of all this. OK, it might make sense to follow meerkat prints, because then at least there’s a faint possibility that they could have been left by Mama, but—”

  “But, these are the prints I saw in my dream, when I heard Mama calling!” insisted Dreamy.

  “Yes, well, she’s not calling now,” said Mimi sourly. A cluster of marks on the cloudless blue sky suddenly caught the kits’ attention.

  “Look out!” warned Skeema. “More sky enemies!” Above the crest of the hill where trees grew tall and green in spite of the baking heat, ugly shapes circled on lazy wings. The kits dove for cover among some spiny bushes on the lower slopes and got their breath back.

  “What are they?” whispered Mimi. “Please don’t let them be what I think they are!”

  “Vultures!” whispered Skeema after a while.

  “Thank goodness! They’re not after me, then!” said Mimi with a sigh of relief. “Phew! I thought they were The Silent Enemy.”

  Eagle owls—feared by all meerkats—held a special terror for the Really Mad Mob because of what one of them had done to Uncle long ago, when he had been King of the Sharpeyes. He forgot to watch the sky for a split second. The Silent Enemy had swooped down, snatched him into the air, and pecked out his eye!

  Fearless by
name, fearless by nature, Uncle had put up a heroic fight and forced the bird to drop him. But he had fallen from a great height and broken several bones. Having somehow managed to crawl back to the safety of his burrow, he soon fell into a fever and then into the dreaded Meerkat Madness! Not one meerkat in his tribe expected him to live. And when he did recover his senses, it was to find that he was no longer King. His sneaky brother, Chancer, had taken his place and married his wife, Queen Heartless, while he lay sick in his bed. So when at last he did come to his senses, he found himself reduced to the rank of babysitter.

  This was how he had come to be responsible for the care of Skeema, Mimi, and Little Dream when their mother had been cast out into exile in the Upworld. Bitterly unhappy with their harsh treatment by the Sharpeyes, Uncle and the kits had managed to escape and begin a blissful new life under a new name in a far-away burrow. Blissful, that is, until just lately.

  “Vultures always mean that something’s dead—or dying,” said Skeema. “Maybe it’s the cat.”

  “Or Mama!” said Little Dream, his eyes wide with terror. “We must find her!”

  Skeema and Mimi both thought he was crazy, but they could see that there was no stopping him. They clambered up the hill as quietly as they could, trying to keep under cover and always sniffing for a hint of the trail of the cat they were stalking. Gradually, the low, flat rocks gave way to taller boulders, and when they looked up, they saw a line of trees and tall, yellowish cliffs beyond them.