Meerkat Madness Read online

  “Vrrrrr!” purred the ’kats, though not all of them quite believed this part.

  “Now, now, it’s getting late,” said Uncle. “We must all get plenty of sleep. We have a big day ahead tomorrow, remember!”

  “Oh, please,” begged Mimi. “Tell me just one little bit more.”

  “Just two things,” added Skeema.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll just tell you one or two more things that made us Sharpeyes chuckle and that’s all. I’ll start with one of the Chief’s bodyguards. Sometimes he carried a tiny spear and shield with him. I don’t know what he was thinking of. It was far too small to protect anyone! And he spent hours squatting down, just scratching the shield with the point of the spear. Very odd! And instead of marking out his territory in the normal way by squirting things with his scent glands, he…”

  “He what, Uncle?”

  “Now you are going to think I’m telling you a whopper of a lie. Every now and then he pulled a small box out of his pocket and yelled into it. Honestly!”

  The ’kats kicked their little legs and laughed until tears ran down their faces. It made Uncle laugh just to listen to them. “Honestly-hee-hee!” he protested. “I’m not making this up! Oh, I can’t wait to lead you up into the sunlight and get your eyes working! I’ll teach you trees! Colors! Sky! Dry, white sand and rich, wet sand after the rains! You’ll see how a tasty scorpion dances when it’s cornered! I’ll teach you how to rub the stink-juice off a millipede by dragging it across the sand! Believe me, seeing is almost as much fun as smelling, what-what! Hang on! I must just have another scratch.”

  “Look out everyone! Here comes another earthquake!” giggled Skeema.

  “Help! A flea-storm!” squealed Mimi with a chuckle.

  Uncle pretended to have a fierce fight with them—which was just what they wanted. They rolled about the chamber for a while, wrestling, yipping, play-snarling, and snapping.

  “Oof! That’s enough! You’ve worn me out!” puffed Uncle, dusting himself down.

  “Uncle! Is it easy to climb a Blah-blah?” asked Mimi, wanting more, as usual.

  “Oh, as easy as sneezing! I remember one time I was…” Suddenly he was alert and on his back feet again, shaking the little ’kats onto the floor. “There! You almost got me started again!” he said with a laugh. “But it’s way past your bedtime.”

  He rolled them into a bundle and stood over them in the guard position, growling gently but firmly. “No more talk. Busy day tomorrow. There are so many lessons for you to learn—you’re going to need all your strength.”

  Chapter 3

  The pups were very excited and also rather nervous. Still, they slept soundly.

  Fearless was not so lucky. He was troubled by his usual nightmare. He dreamed of beaks and claws and fighting and falling. He flung out his arms and legs like a star. This always happened just at the moment when a giant eagle owl dropped him and left him falling toward the rocks. His jerking, kicking, and shouts of terror shocked him awake—and woke everyone else.

  Little Dream was the first to comfort him. “Safe, Uncle,” he said, and held him tight. He groomed him for a moment, feeling through his fur for fleas. As soon as Skeema and Mimi realized what was wrong, they were up and hugging him, too.

  “I don’t know what all this fuss is about,” grumbled Uncle, trying to pretend nothing had happened, but trembling all the same.

  “If The Silent Enemy comes down on us when we reach the Upworld, I’m going to bite his head off!” said Skeema, doing his best to sound brave.

  “Good boy!” said Uncle. “That’s the spirit! But don’t you worry about enemies. We shall be perfectly safe so long as we look out for one another. You see, I was…well, I was on my own. I was caught off guard, what-what! It was hunger that did it. My mind was on a tasty rock lizard, d’you see? The eagle owl saw his chance, came out of the sun, snatched me into the air, and took out my eye with his claw.”

  “Poor Uncle,” said Little Dream.

  “Never be off your guard!” warned Uncle. His voice grew stronger as he added: “Ah! But at least I gave him a taste of his own medicine! I pulled a great mouthful of feathers out of his chest! Ha-ha! That shook him! That showed him who was boss! He couldn’t hold me then, what-what!”

  He decided not to mention that the eagle owl had dropped him from a great height and smashed several of his bones. This was not the time. He took a deep breath to stop himself from shaking at the memory of it. “But it was all rather a shock, I don’t mind telling you. It took me a very long time to get my strength back,” he went on. “My mind wandered. I was feverish! I was weak as a grub! The rest of the Sharpeyes thought I had the Meerkat Madness. They didn’t think I’d live. So naturally, they had to choose another…”

  He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence and so Little Dream said, “Never mind. You can be our secret king.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried Skeema and Mimi. “Three cheers for our secret king!”

  “Harrumph!” grunted Uncle, feeling foolish. “No more nonsense, now! Up and follow, ’kats. Up and follow.” Without another word, he began digging at the nursery door.

  The little meerkats had learned their lessons well and stood in line behind him in their digging order. Each passed the scooped-out sand to the one behind, as if they were passing buckets of water to put out a fire. Skeema was right behind Uncle Fearless, his brave heart pounding; then Mimi, then Little Dream. In a flash they had removed more pounds of sand than all their weight put together—and found themselves in a damp and chilly passageway.

  Blindly they followed their noses and ears through this and other passages, and into a wider space. Uncle told them in a whisper that they had reached the main tunnel. There were strange, new smells in each place they came to and their paws were tickled by unknown dung beetles at work with their loads.

  “On,” said Uncle. “And say nothing until I tell you.”

  They followed silently until the tunnel did a peculiar thing. Its blackness rolled back and became something else, not so solid. This made them gasp and Dream began to whimper quietly.

  “Don’t worry. This is just the sunlight pushing in,” said Uncle. “It creeps into the burrow slowly so as not to shock our eyes. You’ll notice it grow bigger as we get closer to the Upworld. But it won’t harm us. It’ll warm us up and make us feel energized. Then you will understand what we call ‘seeing.’ You’ll enjoy it once you’re used to it.”

  They pressed forward and smelled new air as the darkness began to move aside for a stronger kind of light that made the ’kats eyes blink. It was there in the half-darkness that Chancer surprised them. His smell slid out of a side-tunnel first. Then came his slick head. That was finally followed by the swaying body of the King of the Sharpeyes himself.

  “Welcome to the Upworld, brother Fearless!” said Chancer. He didn’t sound very welcoming. “The Queen’s hungry,” he went on. “She’s keen to forage on the hunting grounds, but she is waiting to greet the young ones at the entrance to the burrow. So hurry. Come this way.”

  Chapter 4

  Queen Heartless was nibbling a grasshopper when Fragrant’s little meerkats and their babysitter were bundled into her presence. She was waiting on The Spoil, the loose sand heaped up just in front of the main entrance. Fearless had once been her husband, but after his “accident” with The Silent Enemy she had taken Chancer, Fearless’s younger brother, as her new husband. Chancer ruled the Sharpeyes with Queen Heartless now. He was the father of her young royal meerkats.

  Queen Heartless hardly glanced at Fearless. He meant nothing to her anymore. That was the meerkat way. It was something he simply had to accept. Still, if it was painful for him to be no more than a babysitter, he did his best not to show it.

  The Queen puffed up her fine, pale fur and sat up proudly, staring into the sun. Her back was to the newcomers as they crept, blinking, out of the burrow. The royal pups, Princes Spiteful, Needleclaw, and Snatch, stood beside her with Princess Dangerous.
A little way off, the rest of the tribe stood at attention or bobbed busily, scanning the skies and the sands all around for enemies.

  The sun was still low in the sky, so the eyes of Skeema, Mimi, and Little Dream were dazzled. Their first sight in this amazing new Upworld was of something shockingly bright and yellow-orange.

  *

  For a second, poor Little Dream thought that the Queen must be the sun itself. It hurt his eyes to look at her and he had to turn away. Most meerkats have dark patches around their deep-set eyes that allow them to look directly into the sun without damage to their sight. This was not so for Little Dream. He was born with eye patches that were so pale they could hardly be seen at all. The royal family were quick to notice this and Princess Dangerous could not stop herself from giggling. “Look at that one! Have you ever seen such silly eyes!” she whispered.

  Skeema and Mimi looked dazed. They felt weak and chilly. Uncle had told them about the need to warm up their tummy-pads by standing in the sunshine, and they tried to stand at attention as they knew they had to. Unfortunately, the journey through the tunnels had made them very tired and they wobbled and fell over. There was more laughter, this time from Prince Needleclaw.

  The queen stopped nibbling for a moment. The grasshopper was still wriggling, although she had just chewed its head off. “Have the new meerkats been marked?” she asked the King.

  “Stand still,” ordered King Chancer, and sprayed them with the royal smell.

  FFFT–

  FFFT–

  FFFT!

  Queen Heartless-the-Dazzling looked down her long and elegant nose at her damp new subjects.

  “Now you share our Sharpeyes’ burrow,” she announced coldly.

  Now you share our Sharpeyes’ smell.

  Now and forever you are Sharpeyes!

  “Repeat after me the Sharpeye motto: Stay alert to stay alive. And stay with the group.”

  “Stay alert to stay alive,” repeated Skeema, Mimi, and Little Dream. “And stay with the group.”

  “You may now bow and scrape.”

  They copied Uncle Fearless as he bowed and scraped and licked the royal face and fur, the Queen’s first, then the King’s. “Now you must greet the princes and the princess,” whispered Uncle. It turned out that the royal pups didn’t want to be licked. Instead, they formed a noisy gang and rolled the visitors over. Since they were much larger than Skeema, Mimi, and Little Dream, they could do it easily. They went for Skeema first, snapping and snarling and turning him on his back in the hot sand. This caught Skeema completely by surprise. Still, he began to give as good as he got, returning with interest the bites and scratches he was given.

  Uncle Fearless managed to get in among the scrapping bodies and whisper into his ear: “Give way, Skeema! Remember your place!”

  Then it was Mimi’s turn to be knocked about, and finally, Little Dream’s. Mimi was bitten quite hard, but did her best to be brave and not make a fuss. Apart from Uncle, not one of the rest of the watching Sharpeyes moved or said a word.

  When the royal meerkats turned on Little Dream, he let out a warning call and words started to tumble out of him: “Wup-wup-wup! Don’t you pick on me or you’ll upset Bold Uncle Fearless—and he doesn’t like bad manners! He’s our secret king and once he bit The Silent Enemy!”

  “How dare you speak to us like that!” sputtered Princess Dangerous.

  Little Dream took no notice. “And he is the King of the Click-clicks!” he went on. “And he’s not scared of Vroom-vrooms, and he can stand on a Blah-blah’s head, so you be careful!” It was the longest speech he had ever made.

  A dreadful hush fell. This was unheard of! A meerkat—a commoner meerkat at that—speaking up without an invitation! In front of Her Majesty! Some of the humbler Sharpeyes began to murmur.

  “Who does that ’kat think he is?”

  “He must be crazy!”

  “It’s all that Fearless’s fault, putting ideas into his head! Secret king, indeed!”

  “Yes, because he had The Madness himself—remember?”

  “You’re right! Do you remember the time, just after the eagle owl attacked him and dropped him on his head? He twitched, he was helpless… he talked nonsense, poor ’kat.”

  “Such a shame!”

  The Queen silenced them all with a sharp cry. Nobody moved. She returned for a moment to her grasshopper, snapping off the legs one by one. For a moment there was no other sound except the whirring of insect wings. Then she said, “I have no time for any more nonsense. Tell me, Fearless, are you or any of these ’kats likely to be a danger to me or to my tribe?”

  “N-n-not at all, Your Majesty.” Fearless was flustered but trying to seem steady.

  “A babysitter’s job is to mind babies,” she said. “Not to fill their heads with nonsense. Mind them. Teach them how to be useful and how to obey. Anything else is… unwelcome. Do you understand?”

  “Absolutely, Your Majesty. I—”

  “Chancer, children, come!” she interrupted. “I lost more weight in the darktime than is good for me. I must forage for food without delay.”

  With that, she turned and galloped off toward the hunting grounds.

  Chapter 5

  “I say, look here, my dear young Dreamer,” said Uncle as they stood alone by the burrow entrance on the very edge of the Upworld. “You mustn’t go about saying that I’m your… your actual king. I mean it’s awfully kind of you but it’s just not done.”

  “Ah, but we like you being our king,” said Little Dream. Small flurries of hot sand blown on the wind made him stagger and squint. Luckily, nature had fitted him with little wind screen wipers, so the sand in his eyes was quickly flicked away.

  “It was supposed to be a secret, Dreamie, you bedbug! You’re not supposed to tell anybody secrets!” scolded Skeema. He turned to Uncle, who was looking ruffled and uncomfortable. “Don’t worry, we won’t say you’re our king out loud, we’ll just know it,” he assured him, anxious to make him feel better about himself.

  “Hear, hear!” said Mimi. “You can keep being my secret king too. Now could you teach me the Warm-up, pleeeeease. I’m freezing!”

  Uncle Fearless looked at his loyal, brave, and shivering secret subjects and his one eye filled with tears.

  “Harrrrumph!” he said, wiping them away with the back of his paw. “No more nonsense. Stand by me and watch carefully. This is how we Sharpeyes do the Warm-up. It’s very important that you get it right. Meerkats lose a lot of their strength keeping warm in the burrow in the darktime. When we come up here at suntime, we need to forage and feed. To forage well, we need to be quick. And to be quick, we do—this. Hup!” He put his front paws under his big fat tummy and heaved up his black tummy-pad so that it soaked up the sun’s rays.

  “Hup!” giggled Skeema, Mimi, and Little Dream, pretending that they had big fat tummies to pull up and falling flat on their backs.

  “Quiet, you silly kids!” roared Uncle, pretending to be furious. “Warm up properly or you won’t get any breakfast!”

  The ’kats first foraging trip in the Upworld was so exciting that Skeema and Mimi completely forgot about the coldness of King Chancer and Queen Heartless and their horrid, spoiled, royal ’kats. They were out of sight of the burrow by the Grove of the Prickly Shrubs. The late summer rains had caused grasses and bright, sweet-smelling flowers to shoot up everywhere, but they didn’t notice. They had food on their minds.

  Uncle showed them how to sniff for damp sand under the hot, dry top-sand. This was where delicious snacks crawled and tunneled, just asking to be dug out and snapped up. Skeema and Mimi worked a little apart from each other, scrabbling with their front paws and heaving up a mound of sand behind them as if they’d done it all their lives. They found larvae and beetles a plenty. It was terribly exciting, like finding buried treasure, and their squeaks and chatter filled the morning air. Even so, they understood that they were never to get so excited as to have both their heads down at once. While one was diggin
g, the other had to look around for danger.

  If the bigger ’kats were quick learners, Little Dream wasn’t quite so confident. Uncle fed him a couple of sandworms to keep him going, and then took him a little way away, up the slope of a sand dune, through the Whispering Grasses, until they were standing not far from Leaning Camelthorn. Suddenly Little Dream dropped flat. “Enemies!” he hissed.

  “Don’t worry,” Uncle told him. “Those are antelopes. They just feed on grass—oh, and those really big ones? Those are blue wildebeest. They won’t hurt you either, not unless they stand on you. Come on. I’m going to show you High Guarding.”

  Patiently, he nursed the nervous little meerkat up the leaning trunk of the ancient tree and onto the branch above. “Keep going,” he urged. Up they went to the next branch, then the next. “Look down there and you can see Skeema and Mimi on The Spoil, by the birth-burrow entrance. Yes? Now look right over there. You see those hills where the sky ends? Somewhere on the other side of them is Far Burrow. Now turn this way. Can you see Bolthole Sands where the rest of the tribe is foraging? There are plenty of places to run to if an enemy comes, what-what! Now, look at those trees just beyond. What do you see?”

  He was pointing to a small forest of black thorns. Some of them had grown into quite tall trees. A few vultures had gathered in a line on the lower branches. Right at the top, a martial eagle was gazing about.

  “Don’t worry about the droopy ones, the vultures,” whispered Uncle. “But keep an eye on that eagle. He’s one of our worst enem—” And that was when Little Dream fell off his perch.