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  “This is not going to work,” said Mimi, when she too collapsed.

  Even Skeema, who was normally one to look on the bright side, began to have doubts. “It’s not so much the length of the tunnel,” he admitted between gasps. “The problem is shifting all the loose sand out of the way.”

  “Let’s just keep at it up until we drop,” said Little Dream bravely.

  “I just… can’t… go on,” puffed Mimi, collapsing again. “What’s going to happen to me?” she wailed. She could hardly stop herself from bursting into tears. “I’m never going to make it!”

  “NEVER SAY NEVER!” boomed an echoing voice. “Tunnel hard, tunnel true, and you never know what you’ll dig up, what-what!”

  “UNCLE FEARLESS!” squealed the kits.

  “Reinforcements!” cried Uncle. “Well, not exactly an army, but two willing supporters nonetheless!” he added, popping out of the tunnel and giving himself a shake-up. “Radiant and I heard you working and dug down ourselves from the other side of the wire to join you!”

  He suddenly noticed Griff towering over him. “WUP-WUP! DIVE DIVE DIVE!” he yelled and threw himself back down the entrance to the tunnel.

  “Wait! This is Griff!” called Little Dream. “He’s our friend!”

  “Grrr-owwww do you do?” growled Griff.

  Uncle popped his head out again. He still didn’t look too confident.

  “Who’s we?” said Mimi, astonished. “You said there were two of you…”

  “Are you sure we’re safe with… you-know-who?” asked Uncle.

  Griff raised a paw and solemnly swore that he would never harm any meerkat.

  Uncle turned and called down into the tunnel behind him, “All’s well, Radiant! The kits are here. Everyone’s alive and scratching, by all that’s crunchy-crawly! Come on through!”

  Radiant appeared.

  “Bless her!” said Uncle, tipping his head. Then, turning to Mimi he said, “You know, I’d never have gotten here without her!”

  Radiant shook the dust off her fabulous fur and said shyly, “Hello, friends!”

  Then it was her turn to catch sight of Griff for the first time. She quickly ducked out of sight again. Mimi looked at Uncle, turned, then chased down the tunnel after Radiant.

  “Oh dear…” said Uncle Fearless, fearing the worst. “I was hoping that Mimi would have got over her jealousy by now.” But a moment later, his two princesses popped out of the tunnel again, not arguing at all. “I know he looks fierce, but he’s very gentle really,” Mimi said, steering Radiant into the open again. “He made us a promise that he wouldn’t harm us and we’ve promised to help him find his mother. But, we need to tunnel him out of here, and we don’t have the strength for it.”

  “Then… if I’m not intruding… perhaps I can lend a paw?” said Radiant hesitantly. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Oh, all right,” said Mimi, trying not to sound too agreeable. She scraped awkwardly at the sand with her paw.

  “I think what Mimi means,” said Skeema with a grin, “is that apart from Uncle, she’s never been happier to see anyone in her life! Right, Mimi?”

  “You arrived just in the nick of time!” added Little Dream. “We’d just begun to think we’d never manage to get Griff out of here.”

  “Rather unusual, isn’t it?” said Radiant. “Rescuing a lion, I mean?”

  “He’s lost his mama too, like us, and we’re helping him find her,” said Skeema. “We’ll explain later. Right now, we need all claws to the sand!”

  There was just enough time for a quick celebration, naturally. What meerkat could miss out on some squealing, cuddling, rolling, and play-nipping at a time like this? “Good show!” cried Uncle, teasingly squirting them with their tribe’s scent. “All together again, at last!”

  Griff looked on, feeling a bit left out. “What about me?” he said sadly. “Don’t I get a squirt?”

  “Certainly!” cried Uncle and obliged him with an extra large one. “There! Now you can call yourself an honorary member of the Really Mad Mob! So come on! Let’s get digging!”

  “One last thing—you still haven’t told us how you found us!” Skeema said.

  “Aha!” said Uncle, with a starlit twinkle in his one good eye. “I thought you might ask that! Well, the answer, my boy, lies in my helmet! Hold out your paws, Little Dream!” He removed his hat with a flourish and tipped into his paws a heap of little, painted shell-fragments, all the colors of the rainbow. “Someone dropped these, I believe?” he added.

  “That was me!” said Little Dream eagerly. “I found them in a little pouch at Green Island. I knew they’d come in handy! I thought if you came looking for us you’d easily see the colors, so I decided to drop one every time we passed an ostrich, a tortoise, or a tsamma melon bush, just in case you were on our trail.”

  “Plus you added a nice little squirt of scent to each shell, eh? Bravo, my boy! All we had to do was follow our noses, by all that’s wet and whiffs! That special spicy Really Mad aroma is as good as any map!”

  Suddenly the lights flickered on in the big, white block and there were sounds of Blah-blahs making a fuss. A shocking bright flashlight came dancing along the track of animal enclosures. It reached out, lighting up gates, throwing long, frightening shadows, making the eyes of startled cats glimmer like the twinkling lights in the sky.

  “Down!” warned Skeema. He had heard the clumping footsteps and caught the sweaty smell of the giant Blah-blah with the safari hat as big as a tortoise shell. It was he who was holding the light and waving it around. He had arrived at the gate of Griff’s enclosure and was rattling it hard. The noise was terrifying. RATTLE-CLANG-BANG-CLANG!

  Griff began to tremble but he did his best to be brave. He got his growl going and stood as tall as he could on all fours. “He’s coming to eat me,” he told the kits. “But I’m not going to give in without a fight!” In the loudest voice he could muster he shouted his faraway name—“ROOOOAAAARRRRGH!”

  The Blah-blah shouted something back. “Sherr-dup! Sherr-dup!” and waved the light at him.

  Mimi had had enough. “We’re not scared of you!” she yelled.

  She ducked through the bars of the gate and ran straight at him. When the giant jumped back in shock, she started high-stepping around him in dizzying circles, nodding her head feathers wildly like a secretary bird on the attack. When she was certain that the Blah-blah was confused and alarmed, she let out a squawk and stamped on his toe. He hardly felt it, but he had never seen a sight like Mimi in his life. What was it? Some sort of porcupine? A bird? … a porcubird? It made him very nervous. He bent down to swat the pesky thing away.

  This gave Skeema the perfect chance to let him have it in the backside with the sharp end of his long stick. AAAH-YEEE! The Blah-blah trumpeted like an elephant and ran for his life.

  “Well-played, Skeema!” said Mimi. “High four!” And they clashed claws.

  “Well done, kits! Sharp, now!” said Uncle. “We’ve got to get out of here before they come back, what-what!” And with that, they put their heads down and dug as quickly as they could.

  *

  The meerkats dug and dug for what felt like several nights, but though they were tired, they kept going, encouraging one another, sensing that, slowly but surely, they were making progress.

  Mimi couldn’t help marveling at the work Radiant put in. “Maybe she’s not completely useless,” she thought to herself. Then, with a little sideways glance at her fellow princess, she redoubled her efforts. And when Radiant gave her an approving smile, she felt a rush of pride.

  With all claws to the sand, it wasn’t long before the tunnel was wide enough even for Griff to crawl through.

  Soon, the escape party had managed to dig under the ditch and under the wire and onto the drive leading up to the main gate. The gate was no problem for the Really Mads. They shot through the bars easily. “Free at last!” yelled Little Dream, squealing with pleasure. “Come on, Griffy!”

 
But Griff just watched in terror. Was he strong enough to leap over those terrible spikes? Trembling, he looked up at the gate.

  Suddenly, there was a sound of doors slamming and the Vroom-vroom gave a roar behind him. Its piercingly bright lights lit up the drive and made Griff’s terrified eyes shine like two yellow moons. His heart thumped. My legs were too small and weak to keep up with Mama, he thought. And now I shall get left behind forever.

  “Take a run at it!” screamed the Really Mads. “Jump, Griffy! You can do it!”

  But it was Radiant who realized that what Griff really needed at this moment was a little motherly encouragement. “You know what your mama would say?” she called quietly through the gate. “She’d say: You’re a big cub now, Griff. You know you’ve got what it takes. Just trust yourself.”

  The Vroom-vroom staggered forward. There were cries of Grabbim! from the furious Blah-blahs.

  But Griff was a big cub now. “GRRRAAHHH!” he roared, and soared like an eagle.

  He cleared the spikes by no more than a whisker. But, he cleared them and that was all that mattered.

  “Majestic!” cried Uncle. “Now—run like the wind!” Secretly, he feared that the Vroom-vroom would be upon them before they could find a bolt hole on the great open plain with only a single tree in sight.

  But Uncle Fearless shouldn’t have worried. All four of its spinners were punctured!

  Hidden behind that single tree in the shadows, was a boy who was watching, and he was happy to see the wild animals run free. He ran his thumb over the point of his spear and clicked his tongue in satisfaction. He was pleased with the sharpness of his tire-buster.

  Flattening his tight curls with his hand, he felt sparks snapping at his fingers. Storm coming, he thought, and wrapped his eland-skin cloak tightly around him. The Great Thirst is over.

  Chapter 13

  Griff and the Really Mads had reached the edge of a ravine lined by stunted shrubs and whispering grasses before they dared stop for breath. The ground was all broken and churned up by the hooves of animals hoping—at the fly-bitten end of this dry season—to find even a puddle to lick. Uncle sniffed and thought he could feel the weight of heavy clouds over his head.

  “Careful now,” he panted. “I’ll go ahead and take a look at what’s down there.” He was nervous. The nighttime is not when meerkats should be roaming around in the Upworld. And right now, they were in very dark, very strange territory, where enemies crept and crawled.

  The earth began to tremble. For a flickering moment, the sky split and lit up like a sunny day. Blinding bolts of lightning hissed and stabbed at the sands, throwing up the silhouettes of a line of elephants coming toward them. They were desperate for water and the great bulls were flapping their ears and swinging their tusks and trunks in a rage. Another flash. “Those tuskers won’t have to wait long for a drink and a mudbath. The rains are here!” cried Uncle

  The elephants began to trot forward like a dark line of moving hills, each one holding the tail of the one in front with his trunk. To the meerkats, even the baby elephants looked like mountains.

  “Cover your ears!” yelled Uncle. It was good advice. The lightning was quickly followed by thunder louder than the hooves of ten thousand migrating wildebeests. It scared even the mighty elephants, and they screamed and trumpeted—and suddenly—it was a stampede!

  “Down! Before they trample us flat! Down into the ravine!” cried Uncle, and led everyone down the steep slope.

  Even in their panic, the great beasts were anxious to keep to the higher ground. When they realized that the land was dropping away sharply, they reared and turned, then dashed sideways, following the line of parched shrubs. Even so, their great, flat feet loosened earth and rocks from the edge of the gully and sent them crashing down.

  “Avalanche!” screamed Mimi as she tumbled into the dip. She saw Little Dream go rolling past her down the bank, like a curled-up beetle. Then, by the dazzling light of another zig-zag of lightning, she caught a glimpse of Uncle and Radiant tumbling together. A huge rock bounced over her and narrowly missed Griff and Skeema, who were just ahead of her.

  All too soon, Mimi lay stunned and scared to death at the bottom of the gully. The noise and the darkness and the crashing earth and rocks spread over her like the dreaded shadow of The Silent Enemy. There was no sign of her little mob or of poor Griff. She had never felt more alone.

  The rain began to come down, at first in fat drops that thudded onto her head and back and pounded into the thirsty sand. Then it came down in lumps, then like a waterfall. Then it felt as if all the air had disappeared and had been replaced by water. She tucked her head under the arch of her little body and made a space to breathe.

  “Yip-yip! To me! All in to me!” It was Uncle, sounding his rallying call in the darkness.

  Somehow Mimi pulled herself together and scrambled toward the sound. By the light of a lightning bolt, she spied Radiant dragging Little Dream out by the scruff of his neck from under a heap of sand, broken branches, and stones. And there, a little farther along the gully, Uncle stood tall, calling, calling…

  “Where’s Griff?” yelled Mimi. “Is he all right? Has anyone seen him?”

  Before anyone could answer, there was a gurgling sound and then a rushing swoosh! of water racing toward them. “What is it, Uncle?” cried Skeema.

  “Oh no! By all that sweeps and swirls! This must be a dry riverbed we’re in!” called Uncle. “And if I’m not mistaken, the river wants its bed back, right now! Brace yourselves, everyone, and cling together!”

  “But Fearless!” came the nervous voice of Radiant. “My dear, I’m not sure if I can swim!”

  “Me neither, my Fluff!” cried Uncle. “But hang onto my fur! We’re just about to find out!”

  “Help!” wailed the kits in one voice.

  The first wave struck them like a wall and swept them along as if they were no heavier than dry leaves.

  *

  Luckily, as Shadow was just able to observe from the bank of the newborn river, meerkats can swim if they have to. They were lit up for him by a purple sheet of lightning, hung down from the swollen, shifting clouds. He grunted with satisfaction and then lost sight of the meerkat mob as they floated around the bend.

  Un-luckily, meerkats are not built to keep swimming for long.

  The Really Mads struggled bravely to keep together without dragging one another down. They managed to steer clear of some nasty looking rocks and then they came to a waterfall.

  It was then that they discovered they were not the only creatures to be swept away.

  First, they bounced off a springbok. That was alright. He wasn’t too hard.

  Then they sailed past a small fleet of snorting warthogs that had no trouble at all sailing along.

  Some zebras struggled in a line to get across from one bank to the other, nodding and kicking the water under them, and blowing raspberries.

  “Look out!” yelled Little Dream. “Snake!”

  It wasn’t a snake that any of them had seen before, but it was huge and fat and winding rapidly toward them. “Stand by to repel boarders!” commanded Uncle. Mimi felt for her headband. The feathers in it had been swept away, but a couple of porcupine quills remained.

  Skeema braced himself. “Wait! He’s coming on my side. Hold my sharp stick!” he said to Mimi, and she managed to take it without letting go of her grip on Uncle’s fur. That left Skeema in a position to hang on, too, and at the same time to dip the Snap-snap under the water and give him a hard squeeze. The hungry snake swung closer. “Come on, come on…” said Skeema through gritted teeth. “Show me where you are!”

  He didn’t have long to wait. A jagged lightning flash lit up the reptile’s head. Before it had time to open its jaws and swallow Skeema—PPPSSSSSSS!—the Snap-snap spat a fast jet of muddy water right into the snake’s beady eye!

  That did it. The side-winding brute made a fast retreat.

  “Shot, sir!” said Uncle, though not with a great dea
l of energy. “Where did you learn that trick?”

  “I got it off an oogpister beetle,” said Skeema, though he hardly had the breath to speak. Like the others, he felt his fur getting waterlogged. He was sinking fast.

  “I can’t hold onto you much longer, Fearless,” gasped Radiant. “Perhaps it would be better if I drifted away. Then you can save your strength for the kits…”

  “Don’t give up, my dear!” urged Fearless. “Hang on. And everyone, kick! Kick for that yellow rock!”

  Kick as they might, the brave Really Mads didn’t have the strength to swim much farther.

  They closed their eyes. There was nothing they could do but let the wild, young river take them where it wanted.

  Chapter 14

  When the yellow rock saw that the meerkats were too tired to swim to it, it couldn’t help thinking: “I wonder if it would help if I went over to them…”

  It paddled itself alongside them and noticed that they all had their eyes closed.

  “ROOOAAAARGHH! ALL ABOARD!” roared the rock. Only of course, it wasn’t really a yellow rock.

  “Chins up, everyone! Paddle over to me. In-out, in-out! That’s it. You’re doing really well…”

  It was Griff, moving around on the surface as confidently as any turtle. The Really Mads heard the confidence in his cheery voice and they discovered that they weren’t doomed after all. “Keep going! That’s it! Grab my coat!” he urged.

  And his invitation did the trick. The eyes of all the meerkats flew open and they started thinking about living again.

  “Heave!” cried Uncle as he hauled his sodden body onto the cub’s strong back. “Remind me to lose a bit of weight, what-what!” he joked, slapping his tummy. “Now give me your paws, everyone.”

  Slowly, painfully, one by one, the kits were heaved out of the river and onto Griff’s back.